Application Optimization Techniques – Cache
If you haven’t picked up on the trend of the recent topics, I have been looking at different application optimization techniques. We looked at sharding as a way to take advantage of multiple CPUs to handle data persistence to a physical disk.
Today I wanted to introduce the concept of Cache. We all know Cache is king (pun intended). We are all pretty familiar with the way relational data engines use Cache to optimize performance for read/write and even query plans. Instead of writing data directly to disk, engines such as SQL Server write to cache, and have a lazy writer process handle the physical persistence.
Applications often use cache as well to assist in performance. For example, a web site might wish to cache data that is primarily static and is accessed often. There is a lot of data falling into this category. Lists of states or provinces are a good example of static data that is used frequently, yet very slow to change.
So how do you take advantage of cache? There are a number of different ways to do that. First, however, you have to have enough memory on your machine to take advantage of cache. This is the reason products such as MemCache have been developed.
Much like NoSQL databases taking advantage of Sharding, products like MemCache use sharding to disburse memory across multiple machines, extending the available cache memory available to an application to the sum of the available cache in each machine participating in a MemCache pool.
Why not share with our readers your caching tools and techniques. Drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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