Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

6. Use Caching Aggressively

It is often said in the world of business that “Cash is King.” In the technology world, a close parallel to this saying is the homophone “cache,” as in “Cache is King.” While we typically tell our clients that there is a difference between tuning and scaling, and while we often indicate that caching is more of a tuning activity than a scaling activity, there is no doubt that the application of caches “in depth” throughout one’s platform architecture has significant impact to the scalability of one’s site. By caching at every level from the browser through the cloud, your network, application servers, and even databases, one can significantly increase one’s ability to scale. Similar to the theme of Chapter 5, “Don’t ...