Java EE 8 Design Patterns and Best Practices

The lifetime of cached data

The lifetime of cached data is a very important issue regarding the cache-aside pattern because the lifetime policy establishes whether or not the cache is efficient. The lifetime defines the data's expiry time according to an expiration policy that invalidates data and removes it from the cache if it's not accessed within a specified time limit. Defining a good lifetime policy therefore means defining a lifetime that is neither too long nor too short. It is also highly recommended that you do not create a global expiration policy but rather one for each type of item in the data store. This is because some data is updated more frequently than others.