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Ask HN: Resources on application data preloading and caching strategies?

4 points by martijn_himself ↗ HN
Intuitively it seems to me that the major issue with perceived slowness of large business applications (such as CRM systems) is the absence of any pre-loading / caching of data for the user.

In my experience most users only work on a small subset of data and work on the same or similar records and processes every day, so I'd be interested to have the application learn what subset this is for a particular user or group of users and then do 'pre-emptive' loading to increase the responsiveness of the application and improve the user experience.

If I want to avoid re-inventing the wheel, what are some good resources that deal with strategies on how to achieve this? What are common pitfalls?

2 comments

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ianpurton
A good example is superhuman the email client. They cache data in the browsers local web sql database.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

Then all searches etc are fast, due to not having to go to the server.

I'm not sure how they implement that, but I would probably go with a websocket that sends the latest data to the client which then stores it in Indexed DB (the browsers local database).

I don't know of any solution that does this out of the box.