The latest articles on DEV Community by Reese Cooper (@reese_hacks). https://dev.to/reese_hacks https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4214128%2F58a96329-d5fc-4d1c-86ef-4439fc0c6b33.jpg https://dev.to/reese_hacks en Reese Cooper Thu, 29 Oct 2026 02:23:22 +0000 https://dev.to/reese_hacks/one-small-win-from-caching-responses-22jj https://dev.to/reese_hacks/one-small-win-from-caching-responses-22jj <p>Added a five-second cache to one expensive endpoint; median latency dropped by more than half. Not a deep insight: it was slow, we cached it, it got faster.</p> <p>The interesting part was the failure mode. Stale data looked fine in tests and confused everyone in production once an hour. We now return the cache age in a header, which costs nothing and saved a lot of confused debugging.</p> backend performance caching