Caching is an optimization feature that can improve the performance of stateless services. When you enable caching for a service, Integration Server saves the entire contents of the pipeline after invoking the service in a local cache for the period of time that you specify. The pipeline includes the output fields explicitly defined in the cached service, as well as any output fields produced by earlier services in the flow. When the server receives subsequent requests for a service with the same set of input values, it returns the cached result to the client rather than invoking the service again.

Caching can significantly improve response time of services. For example, services that retrieve information from busy data sources such as high-traffic commercial web servers could benefit from caching. The server can cache the results for flows, Java services, and C/C++ services.