Introduction

We added pagination, searching, and ordering functions to our Smilecook application in our last chapter so that users can navigate to their recipes much easier. This also helps to reduce the server burden and improve performance. We have explained how making our APIs snappy is important in today's world.

In this chapter, we will be further improving our API performance from another aspect. We will be adding in the cache function, which will temporarily save data to the application memory. This will allow us to save the time required to query the database every time. This can greatly improve API performance and reduce server burden. There is a Flask extension package, Flask-Caching, that can help us in implementing the caching function. We will first talk about the theory behind caching, and through practical exercises, we show you how to implement this function in our Smilecook application.

Besides caching, we will implement a rate-limiting function. That will...