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6.3 Priming the cache
Some business Web sites, such as those of stock exchanges and event ticketing companies, are regularly subject to extreme load pressures at a particular time of day. For example, at a stock exchange, loads can peak at the start of the business day when trading commences. Other sites may simply change their product catalog or update prices on a daily basis. Either way, the cache will need to be rebuilt in order to accommodate the new changes.
We recommend that you run automatic scripts to ensure that your site's most frequently accessed pages and data are loaded into cache well before they are needed by your clients. Then, when a large number of requests come flooding in, your site is ready to cope.
This caching pre-loading activity is often referred to as warming up or priming the cache. Again, the objective of cache warming is to be as responsive as possible before the commencement of very heavy processing periods by having the application server primed to cope with these loads.
Priming the cache can be very effective in clustered environments, where the distributed replication service may take quite a while to update all the cluster members, especially if the number of cache entries to distribute is large.