How We Reduced GrabX SDK Initialisation Time
Article Summary
Grab's SDK was taking 4 minutes to initialize with 400MB of config data. That's a cold start problem that kills autoscaling.
Grab's engineering team tackled their GrabX SDK initialization bottleneck through a phased optimization approach. GrabX is their central platform for product configuration management, serving configs to client services across their superapp ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
- Phase 1: Parallelized subscribed and common data loads (80% faster)
- Phase 2: Concurrent downloads for large config files (6% additional improvement)
- Phase 3: Removed disk persistence that conflicted with fresh data requirements (50% faster)
- Final result: Up to 90% reduction in initialization time across services
Critical Insight
A three-phase optimization reduced SDK initialization time by up to 90% by parallelizing loads and eliminating unnecessary disk persistence.
