jargon

Backend & systems·Caching and invalidation

you let the cached value expire after a fixed number of seconds instead of trying to work out exactly when it stopped being true.

Time to live

Also calledTTL, expiry

An expiry stamped on a cache entry, after which it is treated as absent. TTL trades correctness for simplicity: you accept being wrong for up to the TTL in exchange for never having to reason about invalidation. Uniform TTLs on a batch of keys written together will expire together, which is one of the common ways to build yourself a stampede.

Commonly confused with