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To Cache or Not to Cache
Things might be faster, but they also might be wrong!
Why the term “caching?”
The Americas were settled by a variety of folks, but one you may have heard of are “French Trappers.” These were French or French Canadians that worked with/ fought wit Native Americans to get various pelts they could trade back to Europe.
While roaming around the Americas, these trappers would occasionally hide supplies, so that they didn’t have to carry them all with them but also so they would have supplies spread out in readily accessible areas. They used the term cache, from the French cacher (to hide) to describe these locations.
Caching in programming
In programming, instead of supplies, we spread data in different locations to help improve the efficiency and quality of our systems.
The main tradeoff is against correctness, you can think of this as the fur trappers worrying about food spoiling, if that was the sort of supply that they cached. A rotten piece of food would really ruin the purpose of spreading out their supplies.
File System Caching
Why use it?
Downloading files, especially large ones, can be a time sink for end users. The greatest example of a file system…
