At Foursquare, tracking and improving server-side response times is a problem many engineers are familiar with. We collect a myriad of server-side timing metrics in Graphite and have automated alerts if server endpoints respond too slowly. However, one critical metric…

This is Part 2 in our 2 part series on latency. In Part 1, we discuss some techniques we use for measuring latency at Foursquare. Here we’ll discuss some specific Gson related changes we made to improve performance in our Android apps.

Last August we launched Tastes to help our users customize their local search experience. Taste tags like “trendy place”, “pork buns”, or “romantic restaurant” not only help users find the kinds of places they like when out and about, but also allow us to answer, for the first…