Comparative Study of Caching Strategies for Lookup Data in Web Applications

Static lookup data is a common type of data widely used in modern web applications. It is frequently accessed while changing infrequently. Despite its simplicity, inefficient handling of such data can introduce unnecessary database load, increased latency, and other performance issues. This paper presents a comparative study of different caching mechanisms for delivering static lookup data. Several approaches are evaluated, including a plain database no-cache approach, distributed caching using Redis, application-level in-memory caching, and browser-based caching using Cache-Control headers. The approaches are analyzed under cold, warm, and update scenarios to provide a comprehensive view of their behavior in realistic operating conditions. The study highlights practical trade-offs between the evaluated strategies based on experimental results and observed performance characteristics.

web caching, lookup data, performance evaluation, distributed cache, in-memory cache, HTTP caching, latency optimization, web APIs