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> cache hit ratio tends to be low

That's surprising to read. Is that because of the sheer volume of question pages? I don't think I've ever been on an SO page that couldn't have been served straight from cache.

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Is it? Most people come to SO from Googling their random tech problems/questions. Not sure how much value there is in caching my random Rails questions, etc

I would expect SO usage to follow a distribution like Zipfs — most visits hit a small subset of common Q/A, and there’s a ridiculously long tail of random questions getting a few visits where caching would do next to nothing. I’m fairly positive I’ve seen some post showing this was true for atleast answer-point distributions.

Though I guess it’s possible for a power distribution for page-likely-to-be-hit to still be useless for caching, because I think you could still get that distribution if 99% of hits are on nearly-unique pages; with a long enough tail, you’d still have only relatively few pages worth bothering to cache, but by far most visits are in the tail

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