Engineering - 5 min read
How we cache without Redis
By Jamie Le - 23 April 2026 - 1 views
Photo: Taylor Vick on Unsplash
For small apps the database cache driver is good enough, and one fewer service to keep alive is one fewer thing to wake you up.
Redis is wonderful. It is also, for a lot of small apps, overkill. The cost of running it - even on a managed service - is real, and the operational surface is non-trivial.
Laravel ships with a database cache driver, and for tiny sites it is genuinely fine. We use it for view caches, route caches, throttling, and the occasional memoised query.
The trick is to keep the cache table small and the entries short-lived. A nightly scheduled command trims anything older than a day, and we pin TTLs aggressively. The result is a cache table that rarely exceeds a few thousand rows.
Would we use Redis if traffic doubled? Probably. Would we miss it today? Not at all.
Laravel ships with a database cache driver, and for tiny sites it is genuinely fine. We use it for view caches, route caches, throttling, and the occasional memoised query.
The trick is to keep the cache table small and the entries short-lived. A nightly scheduled command trims anything older than a day, and we pin TTLs aggressively. The result is a cache table that rarely exceeds a few thousand rows.
Would we use Redis if traffic doubled? Probably. Would we miss it today? Not at all.
