A Comprehensive Guide to Distributed Caching

Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance
13 min readFeb 8, 2023

--

An essential website requires a web server to receive requests and a database to write or read data. However, this simple setup will only scale once you optimise your database or change the overall database strategy if you receive millions of requests per second. Is that correct? The database eventually reached its limit on Active Connections and had difficulty managing concurrent requests.

One solution to consider when looking to improve a system’s scalability is caching. Caching is a widely used technique that can be found in many different areas, including web applications, databases, media streaming, e-commerce, gaming, cloud computing, and mobile applications.

Before delving deeper into caching, it is essential first to understand its advantages over using a traditional database alone. Caching can offer several benefits that a database alone may not provide:

  1. Speed: Caching can significantly improve the speed of an application by storing frequently accessed data in memory, which can be accessed much faster than data stored on disk.
  2. Scalability: Caching can help scale an application by distributing the load across multiple cache servers, which can handle many requests.
  3. Reducing the load on the database: Caching can reduce the load by storing frequently accessed…

--

--

Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance

Love is an experience cloud engineer with a demonstrated history of building large scale enterprise application.