Faster websites, more reliable data
Thursday, October 14, 2010 - 05:50
in Mathematics & Economics
Today, visiting almost any major website -- checking your Facebook news feed, looking for books on Amazon, bidding for merchandise on eBay -- involves querying a database. But the databases that these sites maintain are enormous, and searching them anew every time a new user logs on would be painfully time consuming. To serve up data in a timely fashion, most big sites use a technique called caching. Their servers keep local copies of their most frequently accessed data, which they can send to users without searching the database.