Yes an external cache is definitely faster. That said does your application need the extra complexity? Is the caching in database really the bottleneck? If not, the question of the external cache is still open.

Databases do improve and provide more "cache like" features, but such caches are still needed for the time being.

Indeed, if you can guarantee your materialized views to always be up to date, you might be able to get rid of some caching... and thus some complexity can be avoided.

It's indeed another possible point of view about caching.

A good example of how you can get bitten by cache coherency algorithms in the CPU.

A bit dated perhaps, and yet most of the lessons in here are still valid. If performance and parallelism matter, you better keep an eye on how the cache is used.

Interesting exploration of the performance for web resources when they're bundled or not. Also dabbles in the reasons behind the exhibited performances, definitely to keep in mind.

Interesting caching strategy. Looks somewhat simple to put in place as well.

Interesting tale and exploration on how a change in includes impacted cache misses. This is sneaky (and solved with more recent compilers).

Nice primer on how Redis works and the type of deployments you can choose from.

Very interesting deep dive into conditional HTTP requests. It fully covers ETag and Last-Modified.