Linus on Caching

I really dislike adding a cache that is there just because we do something stupid. We can fix the over-abundance of lstat() calls by just being smarter. And the smarter we are, the less the cache will help, and the more it will hurt. Which is the real reason why I think the cache is a really really bad idea: it optimizes for the wrong kind of behavior. So we have other caches and hashes we use, like the index itself, or the name lookup hash into the index, or the delta cache. Maintaining those caches takes some effort too, but those caches aren't there because we're doing something stupid, they are there because they allow us to do something smart. -- Linus Torvalds on caching repeated operations