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

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

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

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