"But you know when the data is changing -- when an article has been updated and republished ... or when you've done another load of the government dataset that's powering your visualization. Waiting for a user request to come in and then caching your response to that (while hoping that the thundering herd doesn't knock you over first) is backwards, right?"

I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything, but it sounds like you're arguing against lazy loading?

Eager caching is very situational, and not something you want to do unless you can reasonably anticipate the thundering herd or have very few items or have unlimited resources to generate and store a complete cache.

I'm probably misunderstanding though.