As the scale of web applications increases, performance optimization considerations are more frequently included in initial design. One optimization technique used extensively is caching. A cache contains pre-processed data that is ready to use without redoing the processing. Processing may include extensive computation and accessing data over a network or on disk. Keep the details out of your code One design consideration when introducing a caching mechanism in your code is to keep the details out of your code. Most caches are just simple key value stores, and so it’s tempting to introduce......
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I’ve had several conversations recently about caching as it relates to big data. As a result of these discussions I wanted to review some details that should be considered when deciding if a cache is necessary and how to cache big data when it is necessary. What is a Cache? The purpose of a cache is to duplicate frequently accessed or important data in such a way that it can be accessed very fast and close to where it is needed. Caching generally moves data from a low cost, high density location (e.g.......
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I’ve been refactoring an application recently to move away from a proprietary and inflexible in memory datastore. The drawbacks of the proprietary datastore included the fact that the content was static. The only way to update data involved a build and replication process that took much longer than the stakeholders were willing to wait. The main selling point in favor of the in memory datastore was that it is blazing fast. And I mean blazing fast. My choice for a replacement datastore technology is MongoDB. MongoDB worked great, but the profiling and performance......
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