Speeding Up the Back End with Graph Theory

Sensor Tower improved a sluggish endpoint by analyzing its profiler data and benchmarking.
The first optimization added a dirty flag to nodes, skipping re-encoding for unchanged parts, cutting time by 30%.
The second optimization replaced linear tree traversal with precomputed paths, enabling logarithmic-time node access.
This required occasional background updates to maintain accuracy.
Combined, these changes reduced latency from 300-500ms to about 80ms, a fourfold speedup, with negligible impact on user experience.