The story
Sofia’s dealership lists around ninety used vehicles at a time. Each listing carries thirty photographs, a spec table, and a finance calculator, and buyers open four dealers’ listings for the same model side by side before deciding whose forecourt to visit on Saturday.
That made the site both heavy and volatile: enormous galleries that had to load fast, over inventory that changed several times a week as cars sold and arrived. Caching helped the speed and, configured naively, would have made the second problem worse.
The answer was a short cache lifetime on listings with auto-purge on edit, so a sold car disappears the moment it is marked sold, while the galleries themselves are converted, lazy-loaded, and served from static HTML. Fast enough to win the comparison, accurate enough to be worth the drive.