

Sales drop for sites after Amazon implements Affiliate API throttling - chl
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/208463/sales_drop_for_sites_after_amazon_query_throttle.html

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byoung2
_One website developer who asked not to be named said that during a busy hour,
his site might max out with the new limits....Each time a visitor searches for
a product, the site queries Amazon using the Product Advertising API for that
information._

Isn't it bad practice to make an API call for every page view? It would be
better to make one API call and cache the results locally for a set interval
(e.g. 5 minutes). The pricing data is not likely to change very much in 5
minutes or even an hour, and for a busy site (apparently his site occasionally
makes 2000+ requests to Amazon per hour) it would reduce the number of API
calls dramatically. For example, if users do 10,000 searches in an hour for
100 distinct products, instead of doing 10,000 API calls, he could just do
1200 (12 calls x 100 searches).

