cacheket

Cacheket is a term used in computing to describe a small, fast caching layer designed to sit between a primary storage medium and an application in order to reduce data retrieval latency. The concept emphasizes storing a subset of frequently accessed items in a fast storage hierarchy close to the processor or application, to speed up reads and writes and to improve overall throughput. Cacheket can refer to either software mechanisms, such as in-process caches or library-level caches, or to hardware-enabled modules that implement a micro-cache with its own eviction and coherence logic.

Key characteristics of a cacheket include fast access times, a capacity that is smaller than the main cache or data store, and mechanisms to ensure coherence with the underlying data source. Eviction policies commonly used with cacheket designs include least recently used (LRU), least frequently used (LFU), and adaptive replacement variants. Consistency models for cacheket systems vary, ranging from eventual to stronger guarantees, depending on the architecture and the needs of the application. Typical goals are to reduce latency for hot data, lower I/O bandwidth consumption, and improve response times for time-critical workloads.

Use cases for cacheket concepts span database query results, web content and API responses, and file-system metadata lookups. Implementations may be embedded within application runtimes, database engines, or system software, and can also take the form of external caching layers that complement or substitute for larger caches such as Memcached or Redis in specific scenarios.

Notes: the term cacheket is not widely standardized and is used informally to describe a micro-caching concept rather than a specific product. It is related to, but distinct from, CPU caches, OS page caches, and general application-level caching strategies.