Optimizing API Performance: Caching, Rate Limiting, and Response Time Improvements
Demonstrates three concrete ways to speed up a Flask API and protect it under load. Server-side caching with Flask-Caching stores endpoint responses for a configurable TTL so repeated calls skip the slow work. Rate limiting via Flask-Limiter caps requests per client IP and returns a 429 with a custom error body when the limit is exceeded. Database query optimization covers adding SQL indexes and avoiding SELECT * to reduce query time. Also shows NGINX-level caching as a network-layer complement to application caching, and pagination to avoid fetching oversized result sets.