Uber Eats Cuts Search Latency by Half with Pipeline Overhaul

Uber Eats has overhauled its search pipeline, reducing the time users wait for initial search results to appear by 50%. The improvements included changing how latency is measured, optimizing candidate retrieval, splitting processing steps, reworking the advertising system, and updating underlying infrastructure. Uber reports Above-the-Fold search latency dropped by over 200 milliseconds after these changes, with no single major redesign, but many incremental gains across the full stack.

• Above-the-Fold latency reduced by more than 200 ms
• Candidate retrieval and hydration were streamlined
• Advertising path and data access were redesigned
• Infrastructure changes improved garbage collection and encoding
• No single fix; gains came from broad incremental changes