We recently switched off Superset's data cache because it didn't respect access permissions. See {T273850} for details.

However, in the change where this was effected. we seem also to have disabled metadata caching, which I don't think was necessary. If we could re-enable metadata caching then I think that this might have a beneficial effect on Superset performance for users.

From this page: https://superset.apache.org/docs/installation/cache

For security reasons, there are two separate cache configs for Superset's own metadata (CACHE_CONFIG) and charting data queried from connected datasources (DATA_CACHE_CONFIG)

Here is where the two types of cache are configured in the superset configuration:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/operations-puppet/browse/production/modules/superset/templates/superset_config.py.erb$77-91

The patch to disable caching undefined profile::superset::cache_uri and this had the effect of removing CACHE_CONFIG as well as DATA_CACHE_CONFIG.

My understanding, from reading {T273850} is that the DATA_CACHE_CONFIG is security sensitive and shouldn't currently be cached, but that CACHE_CONFIG is not security sensitive and we should be OK to cache it.

This ticket also relates to T294046: Write document about "Fast Enough Superset".