Microcaching is a very useful startegy when we want to setup a simple cache without complicated expiration logic. With Nginx you can set it up in 5 minutes for any website
What is microcaching?
Microcaching is a caching strategy where the expire time is set to a very low value like 1-10 seconds. In some cases it can be extended to as far as 1 minute, but the prefix micro refers to a small amount of time. Where is is applicable you might ask? Since the caching purpose is to save time on repeated tasks that have te same output, microcaching cames best handy where we do not know how to invalidate the cache. For example, imagine that you have a website where the main page called index is hit very often by the users (like 100 times per second). The main page can aggregate things like weather, news list, main article, a bunch of photos. Each of those modules can have their own invalidation logic. Instead of caching each module and invalidating it separately we can cache the wole main page and invalidate it every 10 seconds. This way we are sure that if any module content changes it will be reflected in at most 10 seconds. On the other hand we save a great amount of time in engeneering a caching solution.
In the above example, the page is hit about 100 times per second. After applying microcaching technique we can lower it to as low as 0.1 per second (which is 1 per every ten second). To achieve this solution we will use Nginx. Look at the configuration below to see how it's done.
proxy_cache_path /tmp/cache keys_zone=cache:10m levels=1:2 inactive=600s max_size=100m;
server {
proxy_cache cache;
proxy_cache_lock on; # Allow only one request to populate the cache
proxy_cache_valid 200 10s; # Invalidate the cache every 10 seconds
proxy_cache_use_stale updating; # Command Nginx to use currently cached content while cached entry is updated
listen external-ip:80; # External IP address
location / {
proxy_http_version 1.1; # Always upgrade to HTTP/1.1
proxy_set_header Connection ""; # Enable keepalives
proxy_pass http://website-upstream; # Setup a proxy server
}
}
upstream website-upstream {
zone website 128k;
keepalive 20; # Keepalive pool to upstream
server localhost:80; # Bind to local address
}
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