Caching Patterns

Caching strategies, invalidation, eviction policies, HTTP caching, distributed caching, and anti-patterns. Use when designing cache layers, choosing eviction policies, debugging stale data, or optimizing read-heavy workloads.

What's Inside

• Cache Strategies — cache-aside, read-through, write-through, write-behind, refresh-ahead
• Cache Invalidation — TTL-based, event-based, version-based, tag-based with TTL guidelines
• HTTP Caching — Cache-Control directives, common recipes, conditional requests (ETag, Last-Modified)
• Application Caching — in-memory LRU, Redis, Memcached, SQLite comparison
• Redis vs Memcached feature comparison
• Distributed Caching — partitioning, replication, failover
• Cache Eviction Policies — LRU, LFU, FIFO, TTL
• Caching Layers — browser, CDN, application, database
• Cache Stampede Prevention — mutex, probabilistic early expiration, request coalescing
• Cache Warming strategies
• Monitoring — hit rate, eviction rate, latency, memory usage

When to Use

• Designing cache layers for an application
• Choosing between cache strategies and eviction policies
• Configuring HTTP caching headers
• Debugging stale data or cache inconsistencies
• Optimizing read-heavy workloads
• Setting up Redis or distributed caching

Installation

npx add https://github.com/wpank/ai/tree/main/skills/api/caching

Manual Installation

Cursor (per-project)

From your project root:

mkdir -p .cursor/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/api/caching .cursor/skills/caching

Cursor (global)

mkdir -p ~/.cursor/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/api/caching ~/.cursor/skills/caching

Claude Code (per-project)

From your project root:

mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/api/caching .claude/skills/caching

Claude Code (global)

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/api/caching ~/.claude/skills/caching

Related Skills

• api-design — API design including HTTP caching considerations
• rate-limiting — Rate limiting often works alongside caching
• error-handling — Never cache error responses

Part of the API skill category.