A social media platform displays a counter showing the number of likes on each post. The counter is updated thousands of times per second across the platform but rarely needs to reflect the exact latest count to its users. A development team proposes using write-through caching for this counter so that the cache and database always agree. The strongest argument against this design choice is that:

Question

Accepted Answer

The strict consistency that write-through enforces is unnecessary here and the database write on every update wastes energy.

Answer

Read-through caching is the only design pattern that can scale to thousands of writes per second on a typical relational database server.

Answer

Write-back caching would consistently produce more accurate counter values than write-through across the platform under heavy load.

Answer

Write-through caching cannot be used for counter values, because counters require atomic increment operations that the cache cannot guarantee under any production conditions.

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