exact-cache

Category: cache · Cloud + Local · Status: v1 — production

Hashes the canonical request. If the same hash has a cached response, return it. Zero latency on a hit. Zero risk of false positives.

What it does

The dumbest possible cache. No embeddings, no similarity, no surprises.

When to use it

✅ Dev/test loops (same request fired repeatedly) ✅ Idempotent endpoints (look up X, format X) ✅ Workloads that hit the same prompt verbatim ✅ As the first module in a pipeline that also has semantic-cache — exact hits short-circuit before the more expensive embedding lookup.

❌ Anything with a timestamp, request ID, or per-call random nonce in the prompt

Configuration

exact-cache:
  ttlSeconds: 3600
  scope: 'user'             # 'user' | 'global'
  includeSystem: true       # include system prompt in the hash?
  excludeFields: []         # canonical fields to exclude from the hash

Metrics emitted

• cache.exact.hit (boolean)
• cache.exact.lookup_ms (number)

Examples

Default — fast cache for true repeats:

exact-cache:
  ttlSeconds: 3600

Long TTL for stable workloads:

exact-cache:
  ttlSeconds: 86400

Composed with semantic (recommended order):

pipeline:
  - exact-cache:
      ttlSeconds: 3600
  - semantic-cache:
      similarity: 0.88
      ttlSeconds: 3600

The exact cache catches identical hits in microseconds. The semantic cache catches paraphrases in low-millisecond range.

How it works

1. Pre hook:

   • Canonicalize the request (sort keys, normalize whitespace, drop metadata).
   • SHA256 the canonical JSON → cache key.
   • kv.get() the key.
   • If hit: return cached response, skip provider call.
   • If miss: continue.

2. Post hook (on miss):

   • kv.set() the response under the canonical key with ttlSeconds TTL.

Streaming

Exact hits on streaming requests replay as a synthetic SSE stream — same shape as a real one.

Cloud vs Local

Local mode has no persistence for exact-cache — restarting the container clears it. Use semantic-cache if you need cache survival across restarts (semantic-cache lives in SQLite).

Source

packages/modules-core/src/exact-cache.ts