[On Reddit] we had to look up every single comment on the page to see if you had voted on it [...]
But with a bloom filter, we could very quickly look up all the comments and get back a list of all the ones you voted on (with a couple of false positives in there). Then we could go to the cache and see if your actual vote was there (and if it was an upvote or a downvote). It was only after a failed cache hit did we have to actually go to the database.
But that bloom filter saved us from doing sometimes 1000s of cache lookups.
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