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USDB: Scaling Storage for Next-Generation Recommender Systems at ByteDance (arxiv.org)
33 points by 1equalsequals1 4 hours ago | hide | past | pdf | 6 comments on HN

In plain words: ByteDance built one storage system that keeps each user's long history in shared files, so the same upkeep work feeds live updates, serving, and training instead of each keeping its own copy. After switching over, average write delay dropped 85.8%.

Abstract

Recommendation models consume increasingly long, attribute-rich user histories, making small continuous updates and repeated large reads a central storage asymmetry. We present USDB, ByteDance's unified sequence storage practice for streaming and batch workloads. CascadeLSM time-based compaction stages materialize application-specific histories; differentiated replicas share persistent files; partial dumps reconstruct inference inputs from captured recent state and versioned history; and a hybrid columnar format accelerates projected reads. These designs reuse maintenance results across ingestion, inference, and training. Production migration records show 85.8% lower mean write latency, while normalized deployment accounting shows 42.1% lower infrastructure cost. Controlled comparisons with an Optimized RocksDB sequence baseline show faster long-history reads across projections and client loads. Aggregation pushdown sustains 8.5x the throughput of ordinary reads under a constrained receive budget. Production reconstruction and direct-file training results demonstrate how shared sequence maintenance supports fresh serving and repeated historical access.

Xiaoran Zhu, Jieming Cai, Weiping Yu, Xi Chen, Shu Cai, Jiahao Li, Yifan Xiao, Yan Deng, Yisha Zhou, Yu Lin, Shiru Ren, Siqiang Luo, et al.
arXiv:2611.02618 · cs.DB · submitted Nov 2, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 17 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables

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Setting up a classical DLRM at work, show of hands: who has managed to bridge the gap to generative recommenders or LRMs?

Our survey identified quite a substantial list of challenges: product cardinality (Semantic IDs?), low performance vs discriminative recommenders (our user intents are heavily biases towards repetitive products), cold starts, entity features, missing explainability suite, training cost, prediction cost, etc.

Has anyone done it easily? Where is the tutorial for generative recommenders ?

GR expertise is essentially only in-house at major social media companies or people hired from these companies. Closest thing to a tutorial for LRM is the Kuaishou onerec papers.
Yeah OneRec is on our radar. I'd love to adapt their pipeline, but it's a very long shot in the small company I'm in.
The future of recommenders is just an agent paging through your data and trying picking the best next options
That's how they've been working for decades, ever since Facebook changed timeline to feed.
So bytedance has the luxury of building custom storage for this, meanwhile we're over here trying to shoehorn user sequences into redis sorted sets