We’re all familiar with the autocomplete tagging setup here on SO.
I’m wondering what is the most efficient method for querying the tag table in this scenario.
A busy site with many users tagging away with the autocomplete feature requires a lot of querying. Say at any one time there are 100 users typing an average of 10 characters to lookup/create their tags. That seems like a lot of queries on a single table and that’s only one aspect of a busy site.
So, is it just a matter of making sure you have a sane delay on the client side before a request is made, or is it smart indexing on the data table, or is it offloading the data on a regular basis to a more efficient server-side lookup store?
I’d appreciate any tips.
Using mysql and php.
Store all the auto-complete options in memory. You can quickly filter the options with a Trie (e.g. this Java implementation). No matter how many options are in a Trie, it will stay
O(1)efficiency.