The agony of the cache
Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The situation where we have just enough of the facts to get the story straight most of the time, but where we are sometimes “bitten” by things that should never have been dredged up from the past. Have I flagged your interest yet?
Don’t get too excited, young ones. I’m referring here, of course, to the dreaded cache file. Designed at a time where bandwidth was extremely limited, and our computers were scarcely able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, let alone handle the Internet. Some wiseacre figured out that by keeping information the user had “used” before, the situation when repeated would be much faster. A primitive recycling policy. Hence, our web browsers cache our discoveries, our emal programs cache our previously used addresses, our program lists cache a recipe for time travel, if going back is the direction chosen.
Now let’s examine the other side of this mirror. You create a web site, make the necessary changes, transfer the updates to your server and call up your site. Oops! The browser cache insists on showing the old dataset, leaving you to wonder why nothing ever seems to progress. Or, you prepare a message to a group of people and depend upon the typeahead buffer of the program to identify a valid recipient. Oops! That wasn’t the right person, was it?
The more experienced among us have learned to empty the various cache boneyards, similar to a gravekeeper in Paris (although I don’t want to have a catacomb, thank you). We’ve learned to use the Shift-Reload combo, to really request a web page from a server. We use spyware programs to empty the MRU (something like an MRE in taste).
Wouldn’t it be better if we could simply abandon the whole cache model. Our computers are much faster now. Our bandwidth is sufficient to supply torrents of data to our homes. Let’s take back the night! Down with typeahead. Let’s rely on our memories.
