I used to work on a production auto-complete system operating at over 100k peak QPS. For prefixes of length one and two we would not even bother hitting the server, just from a quality perspective, not because of latency/throughput considerations. Btw, up until 3 characters, you could store everything in an in-memory hash map. 20x speedup on length 4 and 5 prefixes is still very impressive, but not quite 1000x speedup either.
- 1444x faster for single character prefixes
- 252x faster for two character prefixes
- 55x faster for three character prefixes
- ~20x faster for 4 and 5 character prefixes
- <= 5x faster for longer prefixes
I used to work on a production auto-complete system operating at over 100k peak QPS. For prefixes of length one and two we would not even bother hitting the server, just from a quality perspective, not because of latency/throughput considerations. Btw, up until 3 characters, you could store everything in an in-memory hash map. 20x speedup on length 4 and 5 prefixes is still very impressive, but not quite 1000x speedup either.