Cache Invalidation Complexity: Rails 5.2 and Dalli Cache Store

Rails applications that use ActiveRecord objects in their cache may experience an issue where the entries cannot be invalidated if all of these conditions are true:

1. They are using Rails 5.2+
2. They have configured config.active_record.cache_versioning = true
3. They are using a cache that is not maintained by Rails, such as dalli_store (2.7.8 or prior)

In this post, we discuss the background to a change in the way that cache keys work with Rails, why this change introduced an API incompatibility with 3rd party cache stores, and finally how you can find out if your app is at risk and how to fix it.

Even if you're not at Rails 5.2 yet, you'll likely get there one day. It's...