Not that there&#x27;s no benefit, but just that it&#x27;s more complicated in a distributed system.<p>Certainly caching is vital to many distributed systems, but it has to be done from a systems perspective.  In my experience a lot of caches are just slapped on top of individual components without much thought, and without even some basic monitoring of what the hit rate is.  I think it helps to actually measure what the cache is doing for you -- but this is more work than adding the cache itself.<p>And I agree with another poster in that I&#x27;ve seen many systems with caches papering over severe and relatively obvious performance problems in the underlying code.<p>I was thinking of this Google publication which outlines some problems with latency variability: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.barroso.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;TheTailAtScale.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.barroso.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;TheTailAtScale.pdf</a><p>Interestingly they didn&#x27;t seem to list caches as one of the causes; they list shared resources, cron jobs, queuing, garbage collection, power saving features, etc.