Redis Caching Best Practices and Pitfalls

Short summary

A practical roundup of Redis caching best practices distilled from production incident lessons. Covers when to cache, TTL discipline, key naming conventions, graceful degradation when Redis is unavailable, and common mistakes like caching without invalidation plans or storing huge values. Emphasizes measuring hit rate as the key tuning metric.

• •Only cache read-heavy, expensive-to-produce data; don't cache reflexively
• •Always set TTLs with jitter as a staleness backstop even with explicit invalidation
• •Design applications to survive Redis outages by treating cache errors as misses, not 500s

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.