What's the most cost-effective way to power game recap pages using a player stats API at high traffic?

The most cost-effective pattern is usually:

cache the API response aggressively, then precompute or pre-render the recap page from cached data — rather than calling the player stats API on every page view.

Best practical approach

1. Fetch player stats once per game update

   • Poll the API on a schedule or use webhooks if available.
   • Store the normalized stats in your own database or cache.

2. Serve recap pages from your own cache/CDN

   • Generate the page server-side and cache it.
   • Or use static generation / ISR-style revalidation if your stack supports it.
   • For very high traffic, put a CDN in front so most requests never hit your app servers.

3. Use layered caching

   • CDN / edge cache for full page or HTML fragments.
   • App cache like Redis/Memcached for stats JSON.
   • DB as the durable source of truth.

4. Refresh only when needed

   • Recap pages usually don’t need live-by-the-second data.
   • Set cache TTLs based on game state:
     • live game: short TTL, e.g. 15–60 seconds
     • final game: long TTL, e.g. hours or days
   • Bust cache only when stats actually change.

Why this is cost-effective

• Reduces API calls dramatically, which is usually the biggest external cost.
• Cuts latency because you’re not waiting on third-party responses for every visitor.
• Protects you from rate limits and spikes in traffic.
• Lets CDN absorb traffic cheaply instead of origin servers or the stats provider.

If you need “live” updates

Use a hybrid model:

• keep the recap page cached,
• refresh the underlying stats in the background every N seconds,
• optionally use client-side polling or WebSockets only for the small live widget, not the whole page.

Rule of thumb

For high traffic recap pages, the cheapest architecture is:

API → background ingestion → your cache/DB → cached page via CDN

If you want, I can sketch a concrete architecture for a stack like Next.js, Laravel, Django, or Node/Express.