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Multi-level caching architecture

Multi-level caching is an architectural pattern employed to enhance system performance by mitigating the latency disparities between different types of data storage media, such as memory, disk, and network.^[600-developer-principle-cache.md]

This approach acknowledges that network access is approximately 100 times slower than in-memory operations^[600-developer-principle-cache.md]. To optimize data retrieval, the architecture prioritizes faster layers; for instance, the time cost of a single disk seek is comparable to reading 1MB of data directly from memory^[600-developer-principle-cache.md].

Common Implementations

The pattern is frequently implemented using technologies like Caffeine (a local high-performance caching library) in conjunction with distributed systems like Redis^[600-developer-principle-cache.md]. This configuration allows systems to serve data from local memory first (the fastest tier) before falling back to a distributed cache, and finally to the primary database.

  • [[Performance optimization]]
  • [[Latency]]
  • [[Redis]]

Sources

  • 600-developer-principle-cache.md