You don't need to know your hit-rate

Rather than focusing on cache hit ratios, this article argues that measuring traffic offload - the proportion of backend requests reduced by caching - provides more meaningful insight into caching layer performance. Hit rate alone can mask important issues like request amplification from content aggregation or failed retries, and the author provides specific formulas and implementation guidance for calculating offload rates using Varnish monitoring tools. The post demonstrates why offload percentage is a more actionable metric for understanding the true business value of a caching layer.