For an in memory cache (ie one not going to disk/network) you have to unnecessarily serialize your in memory representation to bytes. This is very frequently t

For an in memory cache (ie one not going to disk/network) you have to unnecessarily serialize your in memory representation to bytes. This is very frequently the most expensive (computational) step in a system. If you are just going to send that stuff to nic/disk eventually anyway its perfectly fine (which is why something like Redis which is an out of memory cache can get away with it).