A marketplace where deleted listings hammered the origin forever
A classifieds site let users delete listings, but old links lived on in Google and inbound shares. Each request for a dead listing returned a 404 the edge refused to cache — default behavior. So thousands of bots and stragglers requested deleted URLs that punched straight to the origin database every single time, adding 60 RPS of pure waste in Madrid.
Nobody was caching the absence.
What we changed: enabled negative caching — 404 and 410 responses cached at the edge for 5 minutes. The origin now answered each dead URL once per window per POP instead of on every hit. We paired it with a 410 Gone for intentionally deleted items so search engines deindexed faster.
Origin requests for missing listings dropped 94%. Database query load fell 23% overall. p95 latency on live listing pages improved from 240ms to 160ms once the origin stopped wasting cycles on ghosts.
The number that mattered: 404 origin hits down 94%.
Edge of Glory
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A marketplace where deleted listings hammered the origin forever
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