28
Caching
Written by Tanner Nelson
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Whether you’re creating a JSON API, building an iOS app or even designing the circuitry of a CPU, you’ll eventually need a cache. Caches — pronounced cashes — are a method of speeding up slow processes and, without them, the Internet would be a terribly slow place. The philosophy behind caching is simple: Store the result of a slow process so you only have to run it once. Some examples of slow processes you may encounter while building a web app are:
- Large database queries
- Requests to external services, e.g., other APIs
- Complex computation, e.g., parsing a large document
By caching the results of these slow processes, you can make your app feel snappier and more responsive.
Cache storage
Vapor defines the protocol Cache. This protocol creates a common interface for different cache storage methods. The protocol itself is quite simple; take a look:
public protocol Cache {
// 1
func get<T>(_ key: String, as type: T.Type) -> EventLoopFuture<T?>
where T: Decodable
// 2
func set<T>(_ key: String, to value: T?) -> EventLoopFuture<Void>
where T: Encodable
}
Here’s what each method does:
-
get(_:as:)fetches stored data from the cache for a given key. If no data exists for that key, it returnsnil. -
set(_:to:)stores data in the cache at the supplied key. If a value existed previously, it’s replaced. Ifnil, the key is cleared.
Each method returns a future since interaction with the cache may happen asynchronously.
Now that you understand the concept of caching and the Cache protocol, it’s time to take a look at some of the actual caching implementations available with Vapor.
In-memory caches
Vapor comes with an in-memory cache: .memory. This cache stores its data in your program’s running memory. This makes it great for development and testing because it has no external dependencies. However, it may not be perfect for all uses as the storage is cleared when the application restarts and can’t be shared between multiple instances of your application. Most likely though, this memory volatility won’t affect a well thought out caching design.
Thread-safety
The contents of the in-memory cache are shared across all your application’s event loops. This means once something is stored in the cache, all future requests will see that same item regardless of which event loop they are assigned to. To achieve this cross-loop sharing, the in-memory cache uses an application-wide lock to synchronize access.
Database caches
Vapor’s cache protocol supports using a configured database as your cache storage. This includes all of Vapor’s Fluent mappings (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, etc.).
Redis
Redis is an open-source, cache storage service. It’s used commonly as a cache database for web applications and is supported by most deployment services like Heroku. Redis databases are usually very easy to configure and they allow you to persist your cached data between application restarts and share the cache between multiple instances of your application. Redis is a great, fast and feature-rich alternative to in-memory caches and it only takes a little bit more work to configure.
Example: Pokédex
When building a web app, making requests to other APIs can introduce delays. If the API you’re communicating with is slow, it can make your API feel slow. Additionally, external APIs may enforce rate limits on the number of requests you can make to them in a given time period.
open Package.swift
Overview
This simple Pokédex API has two routes:
Normal request
A typical Vapor requests takes only a couple of milliseconds to respond, when working locally. In the screenshot that follows, you can see the GET /pokemon route has a total response time of about 40ms.
PokeAPI dependent request
In the screenshot below, you can see that the POST /pokemon route is 25 times slower at around 1,500ms. This is because the pokeapi.co API can be slow to respond to the query.
Verifying the name
In Xcode, open PokeAPI.swift and look at verify(name:).
Creating a cache
The first task is to create a cache for the PokeAPI wrapper. In PokeAPI.swift, add a new property to store the cache below let client: Client:
/// Cache to check before calling API.
let cache: Cache
public init(client: Client, cache: Cache) {
self.client = client
self.cache = cache
}
extension Request {
public var pokeAPI: PokeAPI {
.init(client: self.client, cache: self.cache)
}
}
Fetch and Store
Now that the PokeAPI wrapper has access to a working Cache, you can use the cache to store responses from the pokeapi.co API and subsequently fetch them much more quickly.
public func verify(name: String) -> EventLoopFuture<Bool> {
// 1
let name = name
.lowercased()
.trimmingCharacters(in: .whitespacesAndNewlines)
// 2
return cache.get(name, as: Bool.self).flatMap { verified in
// 3
if let verified = verified {
return self.client.eventLoop.makeSucceededFuture(verified)
} else {
return self.uncachedVerify(name: name).flatMap {
verified in
// 4
return self.cache.set(name, to: verified)
.transform(to: verified)
}
}
}
}
Fluent
Once you have configured your app to use Vapor’s cache interface, it’s easy to swap out the underlying implementation. Since this app already uses SQLite to store caught Pokémon, you can easily enable Fluent as a cache. Unlike in-memory caching, Fluent caches are shared between multiple instances of your application and are persisted between restarts.
app.caches.use(.fluent)
try routes(app)
app.migrations.add(CreatePokemon())
app.migrations.add(CacheEntry.migration)
Where to go from here?
Caching is an important concept in Computer Science and understanding how to use it will help make your web applications feel fast and responsive. There are several methods for storing your cache data for web applications: in-memory, Fluent database, Redis and more. Each has distinct benefits over the other.
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