jargon

Backend & systems·Caching and invalidation

you populate the cache before you send real traffic at it, so the first users after a deploy do not eat every miss.

Cache warming

Also calledcache priming, pre-warming

Loading likely-needed entries into a cold cache ahead of serving. It matters most where an empty cache means the origin cannot survive the resulting load, which is common after a restart, a failover, or a deploy that changes the key format. Warming is also what you skip and then rediscover during an incident, when the cache is empty for a completely different reason.

Commonly confused with