Optimizing and scaling for large databases

If you are reading that section it means that you've managed to gather a lot of locations that you want to show on the map! Congratulations - you belong to the 1% of the Hotspots users.

Showing a lot of locations on the map present us with unique problems. Let us say that you have 20 000 locations that you want to show on the map. If we load all the locations at once there are 2 possible things that are going to happen.

1. Your server will crash

2. Your browser will crash

Obviously we don't want either of those to happen. There are different ways to take care of the problem and they all depend on the number of locations you want to show. If you have 2 000 locations you can use a javascript Marker manager and it will work fine, but the more locations you start to have, the more difficult it will become to use only javascript Marker Managers. Since with Hotspots we have no idea how many markers your site has, we've decided that a pure javascript solution is not the right thing.

In Hotspots we've implemented the server side boundary method + custom tile method.