Question

What are some alternatives to Cache Invalidation?

Answer 1

There are three alternatives to cache invalidation.

• The first is to expire your cached content quickly by reducing its time to live (TTL). However, short TTLs cause a higher load on the application because content must be fetched from it more often. Moreover, reduced TTL does not guarantee that clients will have fresh content, especially if the content changes very rapidly as a result of client interactions with the application.
• The second alternative is to validate the freshness of cached content at every request. Again, this means more load on your application, even if you return early (for instance by using HEAD requests).
• The last resort is to not cache volatile content at all. While this guarantees the user always sees changes without delay, it obviously increases your application load even more.