Microsoft's Bing team reveals how it improves its site performance

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Microsoft's Bing Chat has taken up a lot of attention since it was first launched over six months ago. However, the company's mainstream Bing search service is also obviously still around. In a new blog post, Microsoft's Bing team goes deep into how they maintain and even improve on its site performance.

The blog post states that when measuring the performance of a search answer to a question in Bing, the team uses a number of tools to measure the effects of the code changes to site performance, before they go live in the real world. Microsoft stated:

The Bing performance team operates a system called the Performance Analyzer Service (PAS) which runs in a highly controlled environment of identical machines and is used to measure the performance of front-end code. PAS runs tests against URLs (or scripts) using real browsers in so-called test agents running on the machines.​

The Bing team also uses time-series dashboards and reports in order to check out the performance of the search engine in the real world. If an issue crops up, the team uses an Anomaly Detection tool. It states:

Anomaly detection efficiently checks a vast number of dimension combinations to quickly identify unusual patterns or deviations in metrics, such as spikes or steps in latency or traffic. Anomaly detection allows engineers to identify and isolate issues to specific areas of the system, rather than having to search through a vast amount of data.​

There is also a team inside the Bing division that's dedicated just to improving performance. It maintains the tools and data that are used to check on Bing's search engine and to provide guidance and advice to other Bing team members so they can use that info to write the best code possible. You can check out even more details on how Bing search performance is improved in that new blog post.