Cache
System Analysis
Normal Behavior
Serves frequently accessed data with sub-millisecond latency to protect backend databases.
Failure Behavior
Serves incredibly fast, completely wrong data for 24 hours because the TTL was misconfigured.
Business Consequence
Customers buy products at last year's prices because the product catalog refuses to invalidate.
Visual Manifestation
"A speedy courier handing you a 3-day-old newspaper with absolute confidence."
Satirical Behavior
"A temporary bucket for data that developers use to hide the fact that their database queries take three minutes to run."
Known Aliases
Technical Terminology
Failure Indicators
System Architecture (Graph)
Used By (Characters)
FAQ
How does it normally behave?
Serves frequently accessed data with sub-millisecond latency to protect backend databases.
How does it fail?
Serves incredibly fast, completely wrong data for 24 hours because the TTL was misconfigured.
What is the business consequence?
Customers buy products at last year's prices because the product catalog refuses to invalidate.
What is the difference between Cache-Aside (Lazy Loading) and Write-Through caching patterns?
In Cache-Aside, the application first checks the cache and, on a miss, reads from the database and updates the cache manually. In Write-Through, the application writes directly to the caching layer, which synchronously updates both the in-memory cache and the backend database before returning success, ensuring strong read consistency at the cost of higher write latency.
How does the XFetch algorithm prevent cache stampedes on hot keys?
XFetch introduces probabilistic early recomputation: as a cached item approaches its expiration time, background read requests probabilistically trigger an asynchronous database refresh based on compute time, remaining TTL, and access frequency, refreshing the key before it ever completely expires.
Explore the system
AI Summary
Cache is a DATA_AND_STORAGE system in TinyCTO.tv. Receives read queries from applications, returns cached data immediately on a cache hit, and on a cache miss fetches the record from the underlying database, stores it in memory with an assigned Time-to-Live (TTL) or eviction policy (such as LRU - Least Recently Used), and returns it to the client.