API Gateway Pattern for Mobile: Request Coalescing, Circuit Breakers, and the Edge Cache Architecture That Halves Backend Load

Short summary

A technical tutorial implementing a mobile API gateway using Ktor and OkHttp that cuts backend load by 50% through three patterns: request coalescing for in-flight deduplication, adaptive circuit breaking with 5 half-open probes, and stale-while-revalidate edge caching. Includes Kotlin code for both server-side coalescing and client-side OkHttp interceptors, plus load test data showing 5 probes reduce false re-open rate to 4%.

• •Request coalescing eliminates redundant network calls from multiple screens and background jobs
• •Adaptive circuit breaking with 5 half-open probes reduces false re-open rate to 4% vs 34% at default
• •SWR edge caching serves majority of reads from cache with max-age=30, stale-while-revalidate=300

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