Bloom filters: the niche trick behind a 16× faster API
Bloom filters are a probabilistic data structure that can dramatically speed up API responses by quickly determining whether an element is definitely not in a set, avoiding expensive lookups. This article explains how incident.io used bloom filters to achieve a 16× performance improvement in their API by eliminating unnecessary database queries. The technique is especially useful for cache optimization, spam filtering, and any scenario where fast negative lookups are critical.