Why I chose a Tiered Caching strategy for PixoraCloud.

I’m deep in the lab engineering the Pixora transformation engine (using libvips + Go), and I had to make a call on caching: Redis vs. Local Disk.

Common mistake: Using Redis for everything.

Reality: RAM is fast, but RAM is expensive. If I cache every transformed image in Redis, the server bill will bankrupt the project before we even hit Beta.

My Solution: The Two-Tiered Architecture.

L1 (Redis): Stores only the "Hot" assets (the most requested thumbnails/avatars). This keeps our sub-120ms latency promise for 90% of requests.