API Response Caching

Jon-K6NL

Many users never see what happens behind the scenes when they make a request to the HamDB API, so I wanted to briefly share an important recent change.

For several years, I’ve used Cloudflare as a reverse proxy in front of the API to help protect against bots and web scrapers that abuse the service. Until recently, however, response caching was intentionally disabled.

As more applications continue to integrate with HamDB, the load on the server has steadily increased. The API has now served its **13 millionth request**, which is honestly something I never imagined when I started this project 10 years ago. Just this past weekend alone, the API handled over **200,000 requests**.

To help keep things fast and reliable, I’ve now enabled Edge Caching on Cloudflare.

Here’s what that means:
- API responses are cached on Cloudflare’s global CDN
- Each response has a 24-hour TTL (Time to Live)
- Requests for the same callsign within that 24 hour window are served directly from the cache

**What does this mean for you?**
Not much, other than **faster response times**, especially for popular callsigns.

Paul

This is really fantastic, Jon! I just discovered your site and will be integrating your API in to my Raspberry Pi project (PiLog) which I'll be releasing shortly. Thank you for making this available to everyone and keep up the great work!

73,

-Paul, NT7PS