Cache Me Not, Cache Me, Cache Me Not

https://hazelweakly.me/blog/cache-me-not-cache-me-cache-me-not/

by mooreds • 2 years ago

57 21 2 years ago

One of the first web projects I worked on involved a dozen iframes and calling postMessage to pass around data, it was chaos. Still remember the senior dev of the project did a pull request, the variable was called “cacheMeOutside” I chuckled and approved.

danpalmer• 2 years ago

Good points, but I'm not sure "push", "pull", "user", or "owned" were particularly well described at the beginning.

I've always found that thinking about "static" vs "dynamic" content to be the most useful breakdown. Services often produce a mix of static and dynamic, i.e. it's not all "owned" just because it comes from the service. Similarly "push" and "pull" are a little tricky to reason about, but "upload via a web form" and "deploy via a build pipeline" are much clearer to me.

"static" and "dynamic" leads to an easy definition too – if it's in the codebase it's static, and if it's in the database (or referenced by it) it's dynamic. The same rules as in this blog post apply though, high cacheability on static and lower TTLs on dynamic content.

In systems of a certain scale this stuff starts to blend together (e.g. if your company runs an internal CDN then everything is dynamic from the perspective of the CDN), but in my experience, static/dynamic and deployed/uploaded is a good place to start that allows for good caching behaviour.

recroad• 2 years ago

I think of it as two:

1. Invalidates easily

pilgrim0• 2 years ago

I guess caching is as hard as writing about caching, then. The author, while not sure if to teach or to preach, did a lousy job at both.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

low quality content for sure

WaltPurvis• 2 years ago

I couldn't be bothered to assess the quality of the content when the presentation is so childish -- performative aggression, cussing like a 12-year-old boy who thinks it makes him sound cool, etc., it's all totally unnecessary and actively detracts from communicating whatever possibly useful information he might have had to share.

dailykoder• 2 years ago

low quality post for sure

sibeliuss• 2 years ago

I disagree! By the end, it all clicked.

gukov• 2 years ago

Am I the only one that thinks using profanity is a lousy way to explain things?

navjack273• 2 years ago

Absolutely disagree!

Conveying frustration of the highest caliber sometimes requires profanity and if you can't deal with that then grow up.

kunley2• 2 years ago

This is much more intelligent article on caching:

https://calpaterson.com/ttl-hell.html

navjack273• 2 years ago

Hey here's a cool tip. Why don't you submit it to hacker News?

Why am I being downvoted for telling someone to submit this link to this website?

kunley2• 2 years ago

I don't know why people downvoted you.

Anyway, this article was here already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26409076

Cache Me Not, Cache Me, Cache Me Not

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