Hacker News Reader

Comment by quickslowdown | Hacker News Reader

I found DiskCache sometime last year, it's amazing. Very simple to set up and works great as a cache for so many different things.

View on HN

What are you using it for? A disk based cache seems almost contradictory for my use cases, I would love to hear yours. Anything that I would store on disk, even as a cache, I can generally put in SQLite.

You'll be happy to know that Diskcache is backed by SQLite (and/or spill files for large enough (size configurable) blobs).

It pretty much does that, if I was to be a little reductive, DiskCache is just a wrapper around sqlite and pickle

The degree of reduction is nice considering the countless times in the past where I wrote my own file cache logic using if/else statements, temporary files, pickle, and bespoke sqlite databases.

Why give myself the headache of maintaining so much extra code when someone already wrote it.

I write some toy Python scripts/apps for a couple APIs (the Pokeapi, Spacetraders, etc). I use the HTTPX library as a request client, and wasn't aware of the Hishel library for caching requests.

I used DiskCache to cache responses for ~15 minutes so I wasn't sending live requests every time I tested the app.

I'm not building anything "cloud scale," most things I run are off my local machine. Having a convenient, fast local cache that's simple to use (DiskCache) has so many uses, it's hard to think of them all! I might use a cache with no expiration to store some configs, or to store a serialized object for later retrieval. I might use it as an in-memory object cache while the program loads, so I don't have to spin up a Redis server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com