Hi, I need help with solving an architectural/algorithmic problem around scraping calendars on the web to have near real time updates to the times we show on our app. The current design involves having a recurring job scrape a site for all of the free times available for a month for a service that is 30 minutes long (our service duration interval) and storing the free times in our database. Then, when a user comes to our site and chooses their services, we pull the free times from our cache, resolve what times can accommodate the aggregate service duration, and show those to our users. The issue is that one of the external scheduling providers has a bug where they dont show all of the times they have available to book. So the optimization of only scraping the times for a 30 min duration and using those free times to calculate which ones will work for a larger duration at runtime gets thrown out of the window. The only other option we can think of is scraping for each individual time interval but that makes the scrape/caching job take way too long to be feasible. The scraping script takes -2min per pass and we need to do it for at least 2 months (the current and next) so for 100 stylists using our current implementation, the job takes 2min * 100 stylists * 2months * 1 (30 min service duration) = 400 min if we parallelize that on 8 machines it would run in less than an hour. However, trying to run the job for every possible aggregate service duration would be 2min * 100 stylists * 2 months * 16 (8 hours by 30min intervals) =6400 min = 106+ hours and even if we parallelize it on 8 machines, it would still take 13+ hours to run and thats too long. Were looking for a fresh pair of eyes that can see another solution we arent seeing that allows for our times to sync with the external scheduling provider on a regular, relatively small interval.
***Some people have asked why the script takes so long. It has to automate choosing a service and walking through the booking flow of the other website to see the times available for each day.
The site is (removed by Toogit admin). If you click on one service and then add some more and click save it will show you the calendar where you have to click on each individual day to see its hours ***
About the recuiterMember since Mar 14, 2020 Inbok Lee
from Odisha, India
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