Cache vs Persistence

Caching is for fast, short-lived decisions. Persistence is for durable replay and auditability. This table clarifies when each is the right tool.

Capability	Cache plugin	Persistence plugin
Re-entrancy protection	Strong	Strong
Replay from a step	Good with versioned keys	Best (durable storage)
Cost control	TTL / eviction	Storage grows unless pruned
Cross-service sharing	Redis backend	Native (DB-backed)
Auditability	Limited	Full (history preserved)
Operational complexity	Low to medium	Medium to high

Guidance

• Use cache for re-entrancy, retries, and fast guards around expensive steps.
• Use persistence when you need full replayability, lineage, and audits.
• For Search, use persistence for Crawl/Parse and cache for Tokenize/Index.