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Title: Apple Migrates Its Password Monitoring Service to Swift from Java,
Gains 40% Performance Uplift

Link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/15/212...

Meta and AWS have used Rust, and Netflix uses Go,reports the programming news
site InfoQ. But using another language, Apple recently "migrated its global
Password Monitoring service from Java to Swift, achieving a 40% increase in
throughput, and significantly reducing memory usage." This freed up nearly
50% of their previously allocated Kubernetes capacity, according to the
article, and even "improved startup time, and simplified concurrency." In a
recent post, Apple engineers detailed how the rewrite helped the service
scale to billions of requests per day while improving responsiveness and
maintainability... "Swift allowed us to write smaller, less verbose, and more
expressive codebases (close to 85% reduction in lines of code) that are
highly readable while prioritizing safety and efficiency." Apple's Password
Monitoring service, part of the broader Password app's ecosystem, is
responsible for securely checking whether a user's saved credentials have
appeared in known data breaches, without revealing any private information to
Apple. It handles billions of requests daily, performing cryptographic
comparisons using privacy-preserving protocols. This workload demands high
computational throughput, tight latency bounds, and elastic scaling across
regions... Apple's previous Java implementation struggled to meet the
service's growing performance and scalability needs. Garbage collection
caused unpredictable pause times under load, degrading latency consistency.
Startup overhead - from JVM initialization, class loading, and just-in-time
compilation, slowed the system's ability to scale in real time. Additionally,
the service's memory footprint, often reaching tens of gigabytes per
instance, reduced infrastructure efficiency and raised operational costs.
Originally developed as a client-side language for Apple platforms, Swift has
since expanded into server-side use cases.... Swift's deterministic memory
management, based on reference counting rather than garbage collection (GC),
eliminated latency spikes caused by GC pauses. This consistency proved
critical for a low-latency system at scale. After tuning, Apple reported sub-
millisecond 99.9th percentile latencies and a dramatic drop in memory usage:
Swift instances consumed hundreds of megabytes, compared to tens of gigabytes
with Java. "While this isn't a sign that Java and similar languages are in
decline," concludes InfoQ's article, "there is growing evidence that at the
uppermost end of performance requirements, some are finding that general-
purpose runtimes no longer suffice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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