The space needed to store historical price and sales data is minimal. Undermine Exchange does it for prices in some ridiculously small space (two digit GB I think) by using compressed files, which makes a lot of sense as there is really no need to have the data in a fully indexed form.
It would help everyone if the default AH UI was updated to provide something like a median sale price for, say, the past week or past 10 sales, whichever is more. The AH could even populate the price with that value rather than its current behavior, which is the lowest posted price.
A few weeks ago, the web auction API went days without an update. (It normally gets an hourly update.) Obviously that had nothing to do with load. Presumably Blizzard was messing around with the AH back end and broke something, and took their sweet time fixing it (as is the case these days).
Another person who doesn’t understand that cancel scanning is not a problem nor is canceling. Canceling is throttled just like posting, and “read” operations are efficient. This was addressed long ago.
Here is the DISCUSSION FROM 2020 that people keep having, like history doesn’t exist.
Also this, also FROM 2020:
FINALLY, whatever the problem is, it isn’t slow-as-hell TSM. There are efficient, stripped-down sniping addons made for the purpose. Using TSM to do “real time sniping” is like using an aircraft carrier to cross a river.