Overview

Caching involves storing copies of frequently accessed data to avoid generating and fetching the same data repeatedly.

Implementing effective caching strategies is essential for optimizing API performance. With API caching, responses are saved and can be reused for future requests, leading to improved performance, reduced latency, and decreased server load.

Benefits

• Improved Performance: Faster response times for users as the data is served from a cache rather than being fetched and processed anew.
• Reduced Server Load: Less processing power and bandwidth required from the server, resulting in cost savings and the ability to handle more traffic.
• Better User Experience: Quicker data retrieval enhances the overall user experience.

What to cache?

Caching is a powerful technique for optimizing performance and scalability, but it should be implemented thoughtfully. Here are some best practices for caching.

It is recommended that for API Responses you should cache frequently requested data that does not change often. In Cleeng we suggest implementing caching to the following resources:

• Entitlements - for more information, see our Entitlements Caching article
• Customer data
• Offers.

Implementation Considerations

While setting up your caching strategies, it is crucial to consider the following:

• Expiration - It’s important to determine how long a cached response is considered valid and set an appropriate time-to-live value based on how frequently the data changes.
• Validation - It involves checking if the cached data is still valid or needs to be refreshed.
• Invalidation - Manually or automatically removing outdated cached data.

By using caching strategies effectively, APIs can handle more significant traffic, provide quicker responses, and ensure a more scalable and efficient service.