Best Practices: Rate Limits, Caching, and Reliability
Production patterns to ship fast apps that scale with sports traffic.
Rate limiting
- Use exponential backoff and jitter.
- Bucket traffic by endpoint importance.
- Apply client-side throttling to avoid bursty usage.
Caching
- Layered caching: CDN → edge KV → application cache.
- Set TTLs by data volatility; apply SWR for live data.
- Invalidate caches on upstream changes using webhooks or versioned keys.
Reliability
- Health checks, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.
- Idempotent writes and replayable ingestion.
- Prefer at-least-once delivery with deduplication for live events.
Observability
- Trace external calls; tag by user and feature.
- Alert on error budgets, P95 latency, and stale data age.
- Record SLOs and annotate major sports events for context.