Caching

Abstract

Caching is an important cornerstone of high-performance web sites. You can use it to accomplish the following:

• Reduce round-trips: Content cached at the client or in proxies can eliminate web server round-trips. Content cached at the web server can eliminate database round-trips.

• Move content closer to clients: The farther away from clients content is located, the longer it takes to retrieve that content.

• Avoid time-consuming processes of regenerating reusable content: For content that takes a lot of time or resources to generate, system performance and scalability are improved if you can generate content once and then reuse it many times.

• Optimize state management: Caching state information at the client is more scalable than storing it in a central location (within certain bounds, as discussed later).