While increasing both the precision and the recall of our secrets detection engine, we felt the need to keep a close eye on speed. In a gearbox, if you want to increase torque, you need to decrease speed. So it wasn’t a surprise to find that our engine had the same problem: more power, less speed. At roughly 10 thousand public documents scanned every minute, this eventually led to a bottleneck.
In a previous article, we explained how we built benchmarks to keep track of those three metrics: precision, recall, and the most important here, speed. These benchmarks taught us a lot about the true internals of our engine at runtime and led to our first improvements.
Of course, now we have all sorts of scanning apps on every phone, but at the time this was a novelty. Let's dissect the application and see what's it made of.