How Semgrep Cut Taint Analysis Time by 75%

This blog post details how Semgrep redesigned its taint analysis engine to run once instead of twice, achieving up to 75% faster full scans. The original interfile analysis computed taint configurations twice, costing significant CPU time. By refactoring the code, leveraging OCaml 5.0's multicore support for parallelization, and thoroughly testing against thousands of tests and production benchmarks, the team reduced P95 scan times from 10 to 7.5 minutes, made P99 times more consistent, and dramatically lowered max scan times. Some large repositories saw over 3x speedups. The post highlights the importance of performance profiling, validation through A/B experiments, and the benefits of parallelizing previously sequential work. 

https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/how-we-cut-semgreps-taint-analysis-time-by-75-percent/

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