This article explains how the Go library BigCache uses sharding, efficient hash functions, and memory‑optimised data structures to deliver high‑concurrency, low‑latency caching, while avoiding GC bottlenecks and providing practical code examples and performance benchmarks.
This article explains how to build an efficient in‑memory cache in Go by starting with a basic map, adding read‑write locks for concurrency, reducing lock contention through sharding, minimizing GC overhead with a ring buffer, and finally using the high‑performance BigCache library.
The guide reviews the essential requirements for Go local caching and compares seven open‑source caches—freecache, bigcache, fastcache, offheap, groupcache, ristretto, and go‑cache—while detailing the sharded, lock‑reduced designs of freecache, bigcache, fastcache, and offheap, and explains how off‑heap allocation or pointer‑free maps achieve near zero‑GC performance.
