via highscalibility.com

Strategy: Understanding Your Data Leads to the Best Scalability Solutions

In article Building Super-Scalable Web Systems with REST Udi Dahan tells an interesting story of how they made a weather reporting system scale for over 10 million users. So many users hitting their weather database didn’t scale. Caching in a straightforward way wouldn’t work because weather is obviously local. Caching all local reports would bring the entire database into memory, which would work for some companies, but wasn’t cost efficient for them.

So in typical REST fashion they turned locations into URIs. For example: http://weather.myclient.com/UK/London. This allows the weather information to be cached by intermediaries instead of hitting their servers. Hopefully for each location their servers will be hit a few times and then the caches will be hit until expiry.

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