[sirgawain33]

Great article. I'll add one: caching doesn't address underlying performance issues, just "sweeps them under the rug".

I've seen many devs jump to caching before investing time in understanding what is really causing performance problems (I was one of them for a time, of course). Modern web stacks can scream without any caching at all.

Years ago, a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf really opened my eyes up to this idea. [1] He takes a vanilla PHP app (Wordpress, I think) and dramatically increases its throughput by identifying and tweaking a few performance bottlenecks like slow SSL connections. One of the best lines: "Real Performance is Architecture Driven"

[1] I think it was a variation of this one: https://vimeo.com/13768954