Eli5: What is cached data?
In: Technology
Cached data is application data that is temporarily stored in an easily-accessible location to improve performance. The idea is that an application that uses this data can access it from the cache rather than retrieve it again from the original source, in order to save time, bandwidth, or some other resource.
For example if you have a weather app on your phone, if it needed to get weather data from an online weather service every time you open it, it’s going to take time to load and consume your mobile data. But it doesn’t need live weather data updated to the second. Instead when you open the app it will load the weather data from a local copy, the cache, and only update the cache if it is more than 1 hour old.
There’s lots of different types of cache. A hard drive will use cache to make reading and writing small bits of data faster. A CPU has cache inside to store the result of calculations it will need later, or to get the next instruction ready to execute. Browsers use cache to store images or other resources from websites you frequent so you don’t always need to re-download them every time you visit the page.
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