Caching is a way to enhance backend performance by reducing the time required to retrieve frequently accessed data from the database or external services.
Spring Boot leverages the @EnableCaching annotation and provides a cache management abstraction to simplify adding caching capabilities to an application.
Common caching use cases include storing rarely changed data, processing complex computations, and storing user sessions and authentication tokens.
Spring Boot offers several cache providers, such as ConcurrentHashMap, Ehcache, Redis, Hazelcast, and Memcached.
To apply caching annotations such as @Cacheable, @CachePut, and @CacheEvict, caching needs to be enabled, and a cache provider needs to be configured.
Time-to-Live (TTL) caching is useful for frequently updated data, while the Cache-aside pattern checks the cache before retrieving data from the database.
Write-through and write-behind caching is helpful when data consistency between the cache and the database is crucial.
Performance monitoring tools include Redis CLI, Spring Boot Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana.
Common caching pitfalls to avoid include caching too much data, caching rarely accessed data, and stale data issues.
In conclusion, caching is a powerful tool that can significantly reduce response times, lower server loads, and improve the overall user experience in high-performing applications.