Caching Techniques: One should know

Behind the scenes of caching and important aspects which WOW you

Overview:

• What is Caching
• Types of Caching
• Caching Topology

What is Caching?

The cache is a smaller and faster memory that stores copies of the frequently used data. Content like HTML pages, images, files, web objects, etc is stored in the cache to improve the efficiency and overall performance of the application.

A cache is typically stored in memory or on a disk. A memory cache is normally faster to read from than a disk cache. But, does not survive system restarts.

Why Caching?

Caches are widely used in most of the high volume applications to:

• Reduce Latency
• Increase Capacity
• Improve App Availability

There are four major caching types used in web development. We will learn about each of these caches in the next set of cards.

Types

• Web Caching (Browser/Proxy/Gateway)
• Data Caching
• Application/Output Caching
• Distributed Caching

Web Caching (Browser/Proxy/Gateway)

Web Caching helps reduce overall network traffic and latency.

Browser caching helps individual users to quickly navigate pages they have recently visited. This process requires Cache-Control and ETag headers to be present to instruct the user’s browser to cache certain files, for a certain period of time.

Proxy and Gateway cache allow cached information to be shared across larger groups of users. Data that does not change frequently and can be cached for longer periods of time is cached on Proxy or Gateway servers. E.g.: DNS data that resolve domain names to the IP address.