What happens when a website goes viral: how a site keeps up with millions of visitors
Caching: why the millionth visitor can be served faster than the first
Millions of visitors ask a website for the same thing. For each visitor, the database looks up the same answer again. One small change stops most of those requests before they reach the database.
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Two million times, a server asks the database for today's puzzle, and two million times the database looks it up and sends back the very same puzzle. That puzzle changes once a day.
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You look at what your database did this morning: two million answers, all the same. Every lookup after the first one made an answer it had already made.
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