Distributed Caching

### The Need for Caching

Databases are often the primary bottleneck in a web architecture due to disk I/O overhead. Caching solves this by storing frequently accessed, read-heavy data in high-speed RAM.

### Where to Cache?

- **Client Cache:** Browser caching for static assets (Images, CSS). - **CDN Cache:** Caching content at edge locations close to users. - **Application Cache:** In-memory caching within the application server process. - **Distributed Cache:** A standalone, shared caching cluster (like Redis) accessible by all application servers.

Distributed caches are essential for horizontally scaled applications, ensuring all servers have a unified view of the cached state.