Using page or database cache for multiple ajax calls in Codeigniter

Question

I'm building a application/game in Codeigniter 3. There is one application running on a beamer in front of a classroom, and other users can play via there mobile. The application needs to send json to the players. It has to be done without any services like Pusher or socket.io, because i can't install anything on the server, and there is no budget for external service.

So i have some Javascript running on the users:

setInterval(function(){
    $.getJSON( "ajax/data/json", { 'id': id }, function( data ){
        // Do stuff with the data if its available
    });
}, 1000);

On the application i have something like this:

public function json()
{
    $this->load->model('data_model');
    $data = $this->data_model->get_json($this->input->get('id'));
    echo json_encode($data);
}

My only worry is the game is played on many locations at the same time. Can i use Codeigniters 'Page Caching' or 'Database Cashing' to prevent too many database requests, and what is the best way to implement this? Or is there any other solution to prevent this?

Answer 1

I think this is a pretty tough question because there are so many possibilities to get a solution for this problem

In my opinion the biggest speed up thing is the use of a key / value storage server as a "between" server (db -> key / value storage -> output) i've installed REDIS on almost all CI applications because it is so fast

if you've access to your server, i strongly recommend to install a service like redis.

For example I took a quick look:

On a I5-2500 local system with 16 GB Ram i can execute 10.000 Queries in about 1 second

And especially in an ajax build up setup you have to be careful - because your request shouldn't take longer than 100ms (approx!)

Here are a few links to make a picture out of this:

PHPredis on Github

Redis Documentation

if you don't have any access to your server you should try to use the file based caching. For further information take a look here (CI Documentation about Caching)