Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Caching
What is caching?
Caching is storing the result of expensive work so the next request can reuse it instead of redoing it. A database query that takes 200 milliseconds runs once, the answer gets kept somewhere fast, and the next thousand requests read it in under a millisecond. The work happens once and pays off many times.
Caches live at every layer of a system. The browser caches assets so a repeat visit loads instantly. A CDN caches pages and files near the user. An in-memory store like Redis caches query results and sessions. The database caches its own hot pages. Each layer answers the same question: can I avoid doing this work again? The famously hard part is invalidation. A cache holds a copy, and the moment the real data changes, that copy is a lie until something clears it. Cache too long and users see stale information. Cache too little and you lose the benefit. A news homepage caches its article list for thirty seconds, so a million readers in that window all hit the cache while the page still stays close to live.
Common strategies include time-based expiry, event-based invalidation when data changes, and tag-based revalidation that clears related entries together.
Caching at Dallonses
Caching is usually the cheapest, biggest performance win available, and the place where the nastiest bugs hide. A stale price, a logged-in user served someone else's cached page, a dashboard showing yesterday's numbers. So we design the invalidation story before we add the cache, not after a customer reports the bug. That up-front thinking is the difference between caching that helps and caching that quietly corrupts trust in the data.
We tune caching per layer and per route, because the right answer for a marketing page is wrong for a live account balance. Event-based and tag-based invalidation keep cached content honest when the underlying data moves. It is a recurring part of our performance testing and monitoring, and it runs through our web development and custom web application development work whenever a system has hot paths worth speeding up.
Pages slow under load, or worried a cache is serving stale data? Let's get your caching strategy right.
Related services
Related works
Vizitio
Turning a brand into a working business.
Access Ticket
Half a million people. One app. Zero chaos.
Ready to work together?
Book a meeting
