Meaning – The term negative response, refers to a response indicating that a request did not arrive successfully or was not processed successfully by the receiver.
In computer programming, negative cache is a cache that also stores “negative” responses, i.e. failures. This means that a program remembers the result indicating a failure even after the cause has been corrected. Usually, the negative cache is a design choice, but it can also be a software bug.
A negative cache is normally only desired if failure is very expensive and the error condition raises automatically without the user’s action. It creates a situation where the user is unable to isolate the cause of the failure: despite fixing everything he/she can think of, the program still refuses to work.
Example of usage – “Consider a web browser which attempts to load a page while the network is unavailable. The browser will receive an error code indicating the problem and may display this error message to the user in place of the requested page.”
