DataTerminology.comNEW
A request not found in cache, requiring retrieval from the origin or backing store.
DESCRIPTION
Cache misses incur higher latency and cost by contacting the origin system. They happen with cold caches, expired entries, or uncacheable content. Strategies such as prefetching, cache warming, and tuning TTLs reduce misses. Miss handling includes fetch, store, and serving subsequent hits. Monitoring miss ratio is crucial for optimizing performance and resource usage.
ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS
Cloudflare
A cache miss occurs when the requested content is not found in a cache and must be retrieved from the origin server.
Highlights origin retrieval and CDN context.
NGINX
A cache miss occurs when the requested content is not present in the cache and NGINX must fetch it from the origin.
Describes reverse proxy behavior on misses.
AWS
If an object has expired or is not in an edge cache, CloudFront forwards the request to the origin to get the object.
Explains miss due to expiration and cold cache in CloudFront.
RELATED TERMS
Origin Fetch Cache Warming Stale-while-revalidate Cache Invalidation TTL Edge Caching Pre-fetching LRU Cache Content Delivery Network
COMPETING TERMS
KNOWLEDGE AREAS
Software Engineering Infrastructure Observability & Telemetry Real-time & Streaming Data Data Storage & Operations
TARGET AUDIENCE
Software Developer DevOps Engineer Cloud Architect Software Architect Data Engineer
EXTERNAL SOURCES
- Wikipedia - Cache (computing)
- Cloudflare - CDN-focused cache miss overview
- NGINX - How NGINX handles cache misses
- AWS - Cache expiration leading to misses
TOP QUESTIONS
Why do Cache Misses happen?
Misses occur when entries are absent, expired, uncacheable, or invalidated. Cold starts and personalized content often increase miss rates.
Category: Misunderstanding
How can Cache Miss impact Tail Latency?
Misses trigger origin calls, increasing high-percentile response times. Reducing misses lowers p95/p99 latency and improves user experience.
Category: Risks
How do I reduce Cache Miss frequency?
Tune TTLs, normalize keys, adopt stale-while-revalidate, prefetch hot items, and use hierarchical caching at edge and origin.
Category: Best practices
What is Cache Warming’s role in Cache Miss?
Cache warming preloads popular items to avoid initial misses after deployments or cache flushes.
Category: Example
What metrics should I monitor for Cache Miss?
Track miss ratio, origin fetch counts, backend latency, and revalidation rates to diagnose caching effectiveness.
Category: Requirements
Can all content avoid Cache Miss?
No. Dynamic, personalized, or frequently changing content may be uncacheable or require short TTLs, leading to inevitable misses.
Category: Opinion
What is a counterpart term to Cache Miss?
Cache Hit, where content is found in the cache and served without origin access.
Category: Alternatives
What are common design mistakes causing Cache Misses?
Inconsistent cache keys, over-segmentation by headers, and aggressive invalidation policies lower hit ratios.
Category: Mistakes
How do CDNs handle Cache Miss?
CDNs fetch from origin, store the response, and serve subsequent requests as hits if cache rules permit.
Category: Management