Josh,
Out of curiosity, why aren't you using PostGIS? It has special indexing
types for the sort of query you mention. While not as fast as memcached, if
you can keep those indexes in memory they are < 50ms to return a lot of
queries.
At some point I'll also post a proof-of-concept for the db-based invalidation
technique I'm using for one project which can get around the regex
invalidation not being implemented yet.
Thanks for the suggestion. I didn't know that PostGIS existed. It
looks like there are similar features through a MySQL extension. For
better or worse, our site is heavily reliant on MySQL as it's integrated
into the code almost everywhere. I will take a look at both though. We
are still new enough that switching databases isn't completely out of
the question.
The realm of location based data is new to me. I've got a lot to learn.
- John
