Caching is widely used in industry to improve application performance by reducing data-access latency and taking the load off the backend infrastructure. TTLs have become the de-facto mechanism used to keep cached data reasonably fresh (i.e., not too out of date with the backend). However, the emergence of real-time applications requires tighter data freshness, which is impractical to achieve with TTLs. We discuss why this is the case, and propose a simple yet effective adaptive policy to achieve the desired freshness.
@article{arxiv.2412.20221,
title = {Revisiting Cache Freshness for Emerging Real-Time Applications},
author = {Ziming Mao and Rishabh Iyer and Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.20221},
year = {2024}
}