Why Caching is important?

Caching is the process of storing data temporarily in order to reduce time taken to retrieve data compared to the original source. This is usually used in many places such as websites, mobile applications, etc.

Caching is used to improve the client’s experience when browsing the web. In the current generation people have lower attention spans and want things to happen faster. Which means, a few seconds delay in loading a webpage can be critical for a company whether make a sale or not.

When it comes to website caching, there are two main ways it can be done. Firstly, the caching can take place in the Client-Side. This is done by storing chunks of data such as UI elements, logos, and other kinds of data that are repeatedly retrieved from the server. This will make the website load quicker than accessing the resources from the server every time.

For example; if you were to disconnect from the internet and try load into a website you regularly visit. You might still see some of the UI elements loading even though there is no internet access. This is basically how Client-Side caching works.

On the other hand, caching can also be done in the Server-Side. If a website needs a large amount of data to load every time a user visits, like a products list in an ecommerce site. The server can cache this data without having to do multiple steps like checking stock availability again if another user requests the same set of data few seconds later. This means, every time a new request for similar kind of data is made, the first user will have a slower experience, but every other subsequent user will have a faster experience.

So what we discussed before is called Read Caching, because the cache is used for reading and retrieving data. There is another type of caching called, write caching. This is where you store data in a cache before saving it to the actual database.

There are two of types of write caching. Firstly, write through caching. This is where you write into both the cache and the actual database simultaneously. This way if anything happens to the cache, the data wont be lost. The other type of caching is called write back caching. This is where the data is first written to the cache and also updated first in the cache, then it will be written to the actual database at a later time. As you can probably imagine, this can create an issue if multiple connections use the same data source, because the data in the database can be outdated. A popular solution to this problem is to have a caching cluster. This way all the servers access same cluster with the most up-to-date data and the data will later be store in the actual database.

References

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