Is it worth it to speed up caches even more?

I think about a cache like a faster database that you check before checking the main database, but at the end of the day, if you do have a cache, you have to check 2 databases. If the cache is sitting in some remote machine, like Memcached, you run into various things that may slow it down by hundreds of microseconds such as intrinsic latency or network latency, and if you choose to query between datacenters you may even get dozens of milliseconds of latency.

I wonder how important it would be to shave off these microseconds, or to even just find a way that we could avoid cache queries when they are misses. I'll keep thinking on this and read more about how hyperscalers use caches.

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