Cache Big‑Key and Hot‑Key Issues: Case Study, Root‑Cause Analysis, and Mitigation Strategies
A promotional event created an oversized Redis cache entry that, combined with cache‑penetration bursts, saturated network bandwidth and caused a service outage, prompting mitigation through Protostuff serialization, gzip compression, request throttling, and enhanced monitoring, while recommending design‑time cache planning and stress testing to prevent future big‑key failures.