I totally see what you mean, coming from a PHP world myself a few years ago. The key thing to note is that node.js (like many other languages including Java) st

I totally see what you mean, coming from a PHP world myself a few years ago. The key thing to note is that node.js (like many other languages including Java) starts a server process that basically does not stop until you explicitly restart it (or it crashes); unlike PHP where every request starts a brand new process on a clean slate (hence needing APCu to store a local memory cache per server). Meaning, what you can accomplish with APCu in PHP can be trivially accomplished by a simple Object in node.js (i.e. a map/hash), by virtue of having a require cache (hence every time you require'd the lib it returns the same instance of the object). If you want a simple open source lib to do exactly that for you and provide an easy to use API, you can use something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/tmp-cache https://www.npmjs.com/package/tmp-cache .