Maxim Mironjuk
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April 03, 2026
Elasticsearch ships with two structurally different, often confused caching mechanisms that both improve response time for repeated requests, but operate on completely different levels: the shard-level request cache, which stores complete search responses including aggregations on the node side, and the node query cache, often also called the shard query cache, which caches individual, recurring filter clauses at the shard level. Anyone trying to improve performance for a facet-heavy Magento store page with layered navigation needs to understand which of the two caches actually applies in which situation, how both get invalidated on write operations, and how query structure can be shaped deliberately so both caching layers get used optimally.