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Making of Monkeys.zip

How monkeys.zip was built

While the initial hype has died down to a small trickle, the monkeys are still typing just as hard as ever, and I figured it’d be a good time to talk about how I built the site. During normal traffic, it’s actually slower (by over 100 ms) to fetch the cached result from Redis than just query the DB for it - but in the early days when the application was being battered by reddit, it was a lifesaver to be able to render the monkeys without the database needing to be responsive. Now that we’re getting into the ‘diminishing returns’ portion of this project, I’d love to speed the monkey typing up, so that we can start carving through the 6 and 7 letter words, but that will require some further architectural changes.

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