Question

I am just developing a sample php page.. to display tweets, for a particular hashtag…

Is there any need to cache the tweets, displayed on my site.. Because I would be only displaying the 5 recent tweets…

Answer 1

Is it required? No, it isn’t required.

Is it a good idea? Very possibly, but that depends on what you’re trying to do!

How many users will this system have? How often will the page be loaded? How important is it to render the most recent tweets as quickly as possible?

Caching will lower the number of times you have to make a request to the Twitter API. This means two things

1. It will be more efficient to cache since you might not need to wait for an API call to resolve, so the page will load faster.
2. It will also lower the load on the Twitter API (which they do rate limit, so if you aren’t careful / doing some amount of caching you could run into trouble if your service is popular).

That’s the good news, the bad news is that

1. If you cache then you won’t be guaranteed to have the very latest tweets.
2. It is possible that you might miss on tweets if too many happen too quickly.
3. You add some complexity to your system.
4. You might be violating the Twitter Terms of Service (you should look into it)

So, in short, no it isn’t required in an absolute sense. Whether or not it makes sense is up to you, based on your system. What is more important? scalability (if so then you should cache)? simplicity (if so then maybe you shouldn’t cache)? ensuring that you never miss a tweet (if so then you could cache, but would need to be smart about it)?

The choice is all yours!