Designing a Thread-Safe Cache in C++

February 17, 2026 · Luciano Muratore

A Thread-Safe Cache Design is a system that makes a program faster when many threads ask for the same information.

All threads share the cache, and that makes things faster. This phenomen is called ‘Cache Hit’.

If something needs to be computed, that is not on the cache, it will compute and then put it into the cache. This phenomen is called ‘Cache Miss’.

In the end, we have many threads to read and write the Cache. To Control them, we need a lock so that only one thread at a time is allowed to write or even to read the Cache.

Below there is a picture that just represents what I have described.

I do wonder if a Thread-Safe Cache Design can be applicable to an Audio Engine. In which situation can it be good to have Multithreading accesing the Cache in an Audio Engine?.