---
id: diskcache
version: "5.6.3"
license: Apache 2.0
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: dormant
---

# diskcache — Disk Cache -- Disk and file backed persistent cache.

License: permissive · Maintenance: dormant · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install diskcache
uv add diskcache
poetry add diskcache

## Description

DiskCache: Disk Backed Cache
============================

`DiskCache`_ is an Apache2 licensed disk and file backed cache library, written
in pure-Python, and compatible with Django.

The cloud-based computing of 2023 puts a premium on memory. Gigabytes of empty
space is left on disks as processes vie for memory. Among these processes is
Memcached (and sometimes Redis) which is used as a cache. Wouldn't it be nice
to leverage empty disk space for caching?

Django is Python's most popular web framework and ships with several caching
backends. Unfortunately the file-based cache in Django is essentially
broken. The culling method is random and large caches repeatedly scan a cache
directory which slows linearly with growth. Can you really allow it to take
sixty milliseconds to store a key in a cache with a thousand items?

In Python, we can do better. And we can do it in pure-Python!

::

   In [1]: import pylibmc
   In [2]: client = pylibmc.Client(['127.0.0.1'], binary=True)
   In [3]: client[b'key'] = b'value'
   In [4]: %timeit client[b'key']

   10000 loops, best of 3: 25.4 µs per loop

   In [5]: import diskcache as dc
   In [6]: cache = dc.Cache('tmp')
   In [7]:...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

DiskCache provides a pure-Python disk-backed cache library that stores key-value pairs using SQLite and the filesystem, offering thread-safe and process-safe caching with support for multiple eviction policies and Django integration.

Verdict: DiskCache is a stable, well-tested pure-Python caching solution with zero runtime dependencies and permissive licensing, suitable for applications needing disk-backed persistence. However, the project is dormant (no releases since August 2023), so it carries security risk if vulnerabilities are discovered; two known vulnerabilities (GHSA-w8v5-vhqr-4h9v, PYSEC-2026-2447) are already present.

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