Caching
While, some vendors will make a big deal of caching, Symlabs believes
that in general caching should be avoided as a long term performance or
failover strategy. Usually, where caching is required, it is indicative
of some other underlying problem in the infrastructure that needs to be
resolved. Nonetheless, there are particular cases where caching can be
used to temporarily resolve a performance or failure issue.
For instance, it is quite possible that a backend server cannot cope
with the amount of traffic that it is handling, resulting in outages or
major performance hits within your infrastructure. While the long term
solution would be to implement additional replica servers and
load-balance requests across them, caching might be used to handle an
exceptional traffic spike, or as an interim solution.
Perhaps the best use of a cache is to offset unnecessary traffic
generated by poorly designed client applications that may be repeatedly
performing the same query many times in a row. In this case, it may not
be possible to alter the application, and it may not be justifiable to
increase the scale of your architecture for one application.
Whatever the scenario, there may be a time where you need to implement a
caching solution to improve performance or to protect against system
failures or scheduled downtime, and the solution should be easy to
implement. Take a look at some of the solutions that we can offer.