# Bloom filters: the niche trick behind a 16x faster API

DevFeed: [Bloom filters: the niche trick behind a 16x faster API](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/bloom-filters-the-niche-trick-behind-a-16-faster-api-11690.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/bloom-filters>)

Author: Mike Fisher

Published: 2025-11-14T11:09:53Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Computer science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/computer-science.md>), [Databases](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/databases.md>), [Monitoring](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/monitoring.md>)

Tags: [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [deep-dive](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deep-dive.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [io](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/io.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [postgres](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/postgres.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>)

## AI overview

This deep dive explains how incident.io reduced the P95 latency of an API endpoint from 5 seconds to 0.3 seconds using a Bloom filter. It describes the alert-history filtering problem, the performance impact of handling millions of alerts in Postgres, the alternatives considered, and the underlying technique.

## Source excerpt

This post is a deep dive into how we improved the P95 latency of an API endpoint from 5s to 0.3s using a niche little computer science trick called a bloom filter.