Using MemCachier for Social Data
The MemCachier Team
~ February 8, 2012
In-memory caches, like MemCachier, are great for speeding up access to popular or expensive database queries. But they can also help if your app uses an external data-source like the Facebook Developer API. Unfortunately, such APIs are often too high latency to service dynamic social applications alone. For example, I built a simple Facebook application that relies on caching to provide real-time search of users’ social graph. You can grab the code from GitHub here.
The example app allows users to figure out which Facebook friends are currently in a particular city by searching for that city. I wanted the search field to auto-complete city names as the user is typing, and I wanted to results to show up instantly. Unfortunately, the Facebook API is pretty high latency - good enough for the occasional query, but not as good for real-time. So, I couldn’t just forward the user’s query to Facebook every time they type in a letter.
By grabbing all of the users’ friends on login and sticking them in the cache, my demo app could process searches without having to talk to Facebook at all!