Satisfying Increasing Performance Requirements with Caching at the Application Level

TL;DR

This paper reviews application-level caching, emphasizing its benefits, challenges, existing support, and open issues, aiming to guide future research in improving performance through caching strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of application-level caching, including its advantages, challenges, existing solutions, and identifies open research challenges.

Findings

Application-level caching improves performance by reusing computation results.

It introduces new design, implementation, and maintenance challenges.

The paper highlights open issues to inspire future research.

Abstract

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.