Satisfying Increasing Performance Requirements with Caching at the Application Level
This is an incremental review article that summarizes existing research and identifies open challenges in application-level caching, primarily for developers and researchers in software engineering and performance optimization.
The paper provides an overview of application-level caching, highlighting its benefits for improving performance and throughput by reusing computation results, while also discussing the design, implementation, and maintenance challenges it introduces.
Application-level caching is a form of caching that has been increasingly adopted to satisfy performance and throughput requirements. The key idea is to store the results of a computation, to improve performance by reusing instead of recomputing those results. However, despite its provided gains, this form of caching imposes new design, implementation and maintenance challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of application-level caching, highlighting its benefits as well as the challenges and the issues to adopt it. We introduce three kinds of existing support that have been proposed, giving a broad view of research in the area. Finally, we present important open challenges that remain unaddressed, hoping to inspire future work on addressing them.