🏁 Experiment at Startup

🏁 Experiment at Startup

Evaluating at startup: an unsolved problem

One caveat of most experimentation implementations is the latency required to get experiment values for each user. Various approaches attempt to work around this, some of which Statsig provides - like local evaluation SDKs, bootstrapping, and non-blocking initialization, but each have their own caveats - like security, speed, and making sure you have the latest values (respectively).

The Local Eval Adapter

Today we're announcing a new feature that we believe resolves many of these concerns for experimenting at app startup: the Statsig Local Eval Adapter. With this approach - you can ship an app version or webpage with a set of config definitions, which can be evaluated immediately on startup. Following that initial evaluation - values from the network can takeover.

Differences from other approaches

While local evaluation SDKs - which download the experiment ruleset for all users - could theoretically solve this problem in the past by shipping that ruleset with the SDK, they didn't have the ability to switch into a "precomputed" mode after that, meaning if you wanted to ship configurations with an app, you were compromising security. With this approach, you can be selective on the info included in the Adapter, ensuring security. Check out the Local Eval Adapter in our docs!