Case Study: Kifi achieves sub-40ms search responses and rapid continuous deployments with Akka

Kifi is built from the ground up with the Typesafe Reactive Platform

Kifi is a Silicon Valley startup that builds a social, personal search and bookmarking service that surfaces and shares content your network finds relevant. Facing a need to perform multiple computationally intensive tasks in milliseconds, Kifi required a reactive, multithreaded, service‑oriented architecture that could scale instantly, deliver Google‑like query speed (target ~30–40 ms), support aggressive continuous deployment and maintain near‑100% availability.

Kifi implemented the Typesafe Reactive Platform—Scala and Play for web services, Akka for distributed work, WebSockets for low‑latency client updates, Lucene for search, a custom in‑memory cache and graph engine, Memcached, and Zookeeper for service coordination. The result: 99th‑percentile search responses under 40 ms, efficient multithreading across fewer servers, dozens of daily deployments (up to several per hour) with no unplanned downtime, and faster team growth and recruiting thanks to the modern reactive stack.

kifi

Eishay Smith

CTO and Co-Founder