Reality check your library idea

[wojtekmach]

@qhwa

Furthermore, if I have high volume of traffic right when the cache expires, all the requests will hit downstream service immediately.

So my idea is to have a process to fetch, hold, then respond to queries with the data. Then it spawns a new process to fetch it again and only kills itself when the new process is successful. Therefore we have no downtime.

Under high load, there are at least two problems with using a process to hold and respond to queries with data:

1. That single process can easily become a bottleneck
2. Data is copied on message passing

You can avoid problem 1 by looking up data in the caller process from an ets table. If your data changes very rarely, (ideally never) you can replace ets with persistent_term which would also avoid problem 2.