Three separate things that were each costing more than they needed to on the
hot path.
- Single-flight avatar renders. The disk cache was checked first and a miss
went straight to the upstream, with nothing shared between callers, so a page
requesting dozens of avatars at once turned N concurrent requests for one
figure into N renders. A render is the most expensive operation this app
does, and the duplication happened exactly when the cache had nothing to
offer. Eight concurrent requests now cause one render instead of eight. The
map lives on globalThis because Next can evaluate the module more than once
per process, and two copies would each start their own render.
- Let public read-only routes be cached by a shared cache. Every JSON response
was `cache-control: no-store`, so a CDN in front of the app could not answer
any of it and every request reached the origin. publicCacheControl() opts a
route in with s-maxage and stale-while-revalidate, using the same TTL as the
server-side cache so the two layers cannot disagree. The default stays
no-store: most routes here are personalised, admin-only or auth-dependent.
/api/badges/leaderboard is deliberately left alone because it returns
per-viewer rank entries to signed-in callers.
Note this only takes effect once a cache rule exists for /api/* at the CDN, or
the explicit `cache: "no-store"` is dropped from the client fetches (24 files
do that today, including the /api/online poll). The headers alone are inert
until one of those happens.
- Take the homepage row counts from the storage engine estimate instead of
COUNT(*), which walks an index and gets slower as the tables grow. A missing
or zero estimate falls back to the exact count rather than ever showing a
wrong zero. The online count stays exact: it is an indexed read over a small
subset and a few seconds of drift reads as broken rather than approximate.
The counters move into one module because the homepage and the boot warm-up
populate the same cache keys, so two implementations would race to write
different values into the same entry.
3223 tests pass.
A fallback render drops the requested effect and is only a degraded
stand-in, so writing it to the 30 day disk cache kept serving the worse
image long after the local renderer recovered. Cache primary renders only
and let the next request pick up the real render.
Effect renders need a little over 4s, which the 4s primary timeout cut off,
so every avatar with the default effect fell through to an unreachable
public fallback and rendered as a placeholder. Raise the primary budget
above the observed render cost and shorten the fallback budget.
Also stop the proxy from stamping no-store over the avatar and media
responses, so browsers keep the long-lived Cache-Control the route already
sends, and recreate the imaging cache directories with the container user
on every deploy, since root ownership made those cache writes fail
silently.
- Add persistent disk cache for rendered avatars/badges (storage/imaging)
so repeats never touch the flaky local renderer and cached renders
survive upstream downtime
- Serve cache-first with stale-on-error; cut primary/fallback timeouts
from 10s/6s to 4s/4s so failing images cannot stall pages
- Avatar proxy now returns a graceful 200 silhouette instead of 502 when
no renderer can produce a figure, so no broken-image glyphs appear
- Badge endpoint becomes a caching proxy trying configured CDN, public
Habbo CDN and local /swf copy in order, and drops the fragile IP rate
limit that could blank badge streams
- Route all site badge images (profile, me, badges, apply pages) through
the cached proxy instead of hot-linking images.habbo.com
openhands