The Fastest SSP Decision Is the One That Has Already Been Made
An auction in an ad system is a bad place to do extra work. The request arrives at the server, and the server has very little time to respond and make several decisions. It must validate the request, parse it, apply rules, decide which demand partners should participate, run an auction to find the winner, and return a response before timeout.
When a system operates under that kind of time constraint, the usual engineering question is, “How do we make this faster?” That is a useful question, but it is not always the best one. A better question is, “Why are we doing unnecessary work during the auction at all?”
In Supply Side Platforms (aka SSPs), a lot of work happens in real time (hot/critical path) because the auction is where the final decision is made. But not every input to the decision needs to be in real time. Publisher...
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