Caching Patterns

Caching is a crucial technique for optimizing system performance and conserving resources. It involves temporarily storing and sharing data in a high-speed memory section. This approach offers two main benefits:

• It avoids the need to retrieve data from slower physical storage.
• It allows the reuse of results from computationally intensive queries.

Shared Cache

A common caching pattern involves sharing a cache among multiple servers.

Consider a web service as an example. If we want to cache a piece of data temporarily:

• Storing it locally on a single instance might make the service stateful. This is because other instances might not be aware of the cached data, leading to inconsistencies.

• To address this, cached data can be moved to a dedicated shared store. All instances will consistently serve the same data by accessing this central cache.

Cache Compression

Cache components can be expensive due to their reliance on large amounts of fast memory. Compression is an important, though often overlooked, method to reduce runtime costs.

Since cache components are frequently busy serving many clients, it’s generally better to assign the responsibility of compression and decompression to the client-side.

Cache-aside (Lazy Loading)

Adapted from the lazy loading pattern, this strategy caches data only after it has been recently read. In other words, the data must be initialized from the primary store for the first time, and then the result is efficiently reused for subsequent requests.

For example, if a service attempts to load data from the Cache Store and doesn’t find it (a cache miss), it then queries the data from the primary store and caches it for future use.

This strategy is widely applied due to its simplicity and versatility. However, the main drawback of Cache-aside is potential inconsistency. Cached data is typically evicted (deleted) after a certain period. During its lifetime in the cache, the source data in the primary store might be updated, leading to a mismatch between the cached version and the source.

Furthermore, if the system handles many complex and resource-intensive queries, the penalty for a cache miss (when requested data is not found in the cache) can be significant. The system might experience numerous concurrent cache misses, leading to performance degradation.

Write-through Cache

A more complex caching strategy is Write-through. This approach abandons laziness and actively caches data beforehand. When data is updated in the primary store, it is also simultaneously updated in the cache store.

Developing and managing a write-through cache is considerably more challenging. Imagine caching the result of a complex query involving several data entities. Any change in these entities would alter the query result, necessitating a refresh of the cache.

Moreover, this preparatory caching can be resource-intensive if the cached data is ultimately not used.

The write-through cache is particularly useful for:

• Ensuring consistency for critical data, as the cache is continuously synchronized with the data source.
• Minimizing cache misses, especially when cache misses are computationally expensive, because the cache is precomputed.

Refresh-ahead Cache

Another common strategy is Refresh-ahead, which involves precomputing and caching data periodically.

For instance, in a game’s ranking system, directly sorting and paginating results from the primary user store for every query would be extremely costly. Instead, the leaderboard can be computed and cached, say, every hour.

The primary issue with this strategy is staleness; the data might be outdated between refresh intervals. Despite this, Refresh-ahead caching is well-suited for computationally intensive data, such as ranking systems, recommendation engines, and analytics dashboards.

Write-Behind (Write-Back) Cache

Unlike the previous strategies that focus on read operations, the Write-Behind strategy is designed to improve write performance.

Instead of immediately writing updates to the physical store, changes are batched and written asynchronously. The cache component temporarily holds these in-flight updates and flushes them to the reliable storage after a certain threshold is met (e.g., a specific number of updates or a time interval).

A significant risk with this approach is potential data loss. If the cache system fails before flushing the data, any unwritten updates will be lost permanently. Write-Behind cache is particularly useful for write-heavy applications, such as:

• Non-critical systems where some data loss is tolerable (e.g., metrics collection, user activity tracking).
• Systems where data loss is recoverable (e.g., transferring data from various sources to a data lake).

Client-Side Caching

In many scenarios, caching can be implemented on the client-side. This helps reduce resource consumption on the server, particularly network bandwidth.

However, this approach should be used cautiously. Client devices often have limited resources, and implementing caching or performing heavy computations on them could significantly degrade the user experience.