Managing Large Dictionaries for Caching with Flask and Redis
I'm having a hard time understanding I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm following best practices but I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm trying to implement a caching mechanism in my Flask app using Redis to store a large dictionary that represents user sessions. The dictionary has about 100,000 entries, and each entry has a structure like this: ```python user_sessions = { 'user1': {'last_access': '2023-10-01T12:00:00', 'data': {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}}, 'user2': {'last_access': '2023-10-01T12:05:00', 'data': {'key1': 'value3', 'key2': 'value4'}}, # ... up to 100,000 entries } ``` I’m using the `redis-py` library (version 4.0.2) to store and retrieve this dictionary. My approach is to serialize the dictionary to a JSON string before storing it in Redis, but I’m running into performance optimization, particularly during the serialization process. The Flask app becomes unresponsive during peak traffic when I attempt to cache the entire dictionary at once. I've tried using `json.dumps(user_sessions)` to convert the dictionary before saving it to Redis, but it takes a considerable amount of time for large datasets. I also considered splitting the dictionary into smaller chunks, but I’m worried about the complexity that adds, especially when it comes to retrieving and merging the data back together. I’ve also encountered issues where, after several attempts to save the data, I get the behavior `redis.exceptions.ResponseError: ERR wrong number of arguments for 'set' command`. Is there a more efficient way to handle this large dictionary caching with Redis? Should I consider using a different serialization method? What are the best practices to deal with large dictionaries like this in a Flask application? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Am I missing something obvious? Thanks in advance! This is my first time working with Python latest. Thanks for your help in advance!