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Response Cache

Overview​

response_cache is the route-local plugin for reusing exact or semantically compatible prior responses.

Key Advantages​

  • Reuses prior responses only on routes that benefit from cache hits.
  • Keeps route-local thresholds separate from global store setup.
  • Supports different cache policies for different routes.

What Problem Does It Solve?​

Some routes benefit strongly from reuse, while others need fresh generation every time. response_cache keeps the reuse policy local to the route.

When to Use​

  • one route should prefer cached responses when queries are very similar
  • different routes need different similarity thresholds or TTLs
  • the route should use a cache backend configured in global.stores.response_cache

Configuration​

Add the plugin under routing.decisions[].plugins:

plugins:
  - type: response_cache
    configuration:
      enabled: true
      mode: exact
      scope: user
      ttl_seconds: 86400
      request_controls:
        enabled: true
        header: x-vsr-cache-control
        allowed: [no-cache, no-store, bypass, max-age, ttl]
        max_ttl_seconds: 86400
      personalized:
        mode: disabled

mode accepts:

  • semantic (default): vector lookup only.
  • exact: normalized exact request lookup only.
  • exact_then_semantic: exact lookup first, then vector lookup on a miss.

The shipped config/config.yaml, multi-objective example, and memory.yaml fragment use exact. It preserves reuse for identical requests without returning an answer to a different question solely because its embedding is similar. Choose semantic or exact_then_semantic explicitly only after validating the route's language and contradiction behavior. The built-in lexical guard recognizes English negation cues; a German nicht or Chinese 不 can otherwise receive a cached answer to the opposite question. The high-recall.yaml fragment remains an explicit semantic-cache example.

The exact tier is available with the in-memory, Redis, Valkey, Milvus, Qdrant, and hybrid cache backends. Anthropic client requests are replayed in the Anthropic response or SSE wire format.

Streaming and non-streaming requests use separate cache identities so replay never translates a cached response across wire modes. Semantic matching uses a compatibility fingerprint over system/history, tools, response format, generation parameters, client protocol, and route policy, plus hard recipe, tenant, request-model, and selected-model partitioning.

Streaming replay preserves content, reasoning, refusal, tool calls, terminal usage, finish reasons, and choice indexes for complete single- or multi-choice streams. Incomplete streams are never cached.

When request controls are enabled, the configured header accepts the authorized directives. max-age bounds read freshness and ttl bounds write lifetime; caller TTL values are clamped to max_ttl_seconds.

Migration​

semantic-cache, semantic_cache, and response-cache are accepted as deprecated aliases and normalize to response_cache. Likewise, global.stores.semantic_cache is read as a deprecated alias for global.stores.response_cache. Do not configure both spellings in the same document. Export, Dashboard saves, and DSL decompilation always emit the canonical names.

For local mmbert embeddings, including Vela Embedding, changing the model, tokenizer, representation size, or inference settings starts a separate cache space. The router retains your tenant namespace and explicit cache revision; historical entries remain stored until their normal expiry or explicit cleanup. The first requests after a model upgrade are cache misses. Restarting with the same representation reuses its compatible cache. The router rejects a remote embedding endpoint for the semantic cache, because the cache needs local tokenizer windows.

Candle bert embeddings are keyed by an encoder version instead, which changes whenever Candle BERT vectors change, as they did when padding tokens stopped counting toward the average. Upgrading across such a change starts a new BERT cache space. Entries written before the upgrade are not reused and remain until they expire, and the cache fills again from new traffic. BERT served by another runtime keeps its existing cache.

Operations​

The management API exposes redacted health, capabilities, statistics, candidate configuration testing, scoped invalidation, and epoch-based flush under /api/v1/storage/response-cache/*. The plugin descriptor at /api/v1/plugins/response_cache links to these operations. Hash-chained audit is shared across management operations at /api/v1/observability/audit (audit.read). Invalidation defaults to dry-run. Flush requires the explicit confirmation phrase flush response cache and never calls backend-wide FLUSHALL.

All six cache backends apply an always-on English lexical check before serving a semantic hit. Near-identical questions with explicit negation or a known antonym swap are rejected even when their vector similarity is high. Remote entries without their original question are also misses. A rejected candidate does not prevent a later eligible fetched candidate from being used; remote search remains bounded by its candidate limit. This check does not establish semantic equivalence for word-order-only, cue-less, or non-English changes.

Every served semantic hit records whether that check could judge the pair, as cache.negation_guard on the response_cache plugin span and as negation_guard on the cache_hit log event. checked means both questions use the same words, in any order, or differ only in negation cues such as not and never. not_applicable means some other word changed, which the cue list cannot judge, so the hit relied on vector similarity alone. Reworded English questions and most non-English hits report not_applicable; for example, the cue list does not recognize German nicht or Chinese 不.

The in-memory backend additionally supports the optional NLI verifier (global.stores.response_cache.polarity_guard; see Stores and Tools). With this optional tier enabled, an NLI-rejected candidate is logged as cache_negation_reject with tier: nli, is reported as a miss, and its similarity still appears on x-vsr-cache-similarity so near-threshold rejections stay diagnosable.

Cached responses can contain user or tenant data. Choose an appropriate scope, TTL, backend authentication, encryption, and invalidation process. Semantic thresholds must be calibrated for the configured embedding model. A query longer than the embedding model's context window (512 tokens for the default bert model) is not cached, because a truncated embedding would match every query sharing that prefix. Routes with personalized RAG or memory should not reuse pre-enrichment responses without an explicit policy. See complete examples: high-recall.yaml and memory.yaml.