Is there any benefit in a cache? What penalty is there for a cache miss? (Analog...

einhverfr · on July 10, 2012

Suppose you are using very slow media and it takes a tenth of a second to retrieve the information. That's an acceptable performance penalty ;-)

On the other hand if you are using external storage, with indirect lookups in order to find the information, that might not be so great.

At the same time, networked responses are great. There isn't a problem with having a different node respond to the request, since this approach uses a sort of strange architecture and session state is shared between all nodes.

RegEx · on July 9, 2012

This is why you don't use analogies when speaking with hackers. We take them way too far ;)

stcredzero · on July 9, 2012

What about level 2 and 3 cache?

zanny · on July 10, 2012

If you faint during the interview, does drinking caffeine afterwords work like a ramdisk or an ssd?

sliverstorm · on July 9, 2012

If we presume your cache analogy holds, all it costs is a little time.