BE of thenewboston-developers/thenewboston-Frontend#684

Checklist

• Index on username column in users table
• Multi-tier cache strategy (LFU or LRFU implementation)
• Cache warming for popular users
• Bulk operations for notifications
• Rate limiting on /user_search endpoint (to prevent abuse/scraping)
  Use DRF throttling for the search endpoint. e.g, 20 requests/minute per user.
• Only fetch minimal fields (id, username, profile_pic) for mentions, to reduce payload & improve speed.

The system can now handle:

• Thousands of requests/second with current setup
• Hundreds of thousands/second with Redis cluster
• Millions/second with:
  • Install django-redis package for advanced connection pooling
  • CDN/Edge caching
  • Read replicas
  • Elasticsearch for search
  • Horizontal scaling