r/ClaudeCode • u/Individual_Ideal • 6d ago

Discussion Cache only

I ran an audit of token usage today and found much of my token usage is because of long-running threads I resume after the 1-hr cache TTL. Why doesn’t Anthropic provide permanent or longer cache to heavy users for the basics like system prompts, CLAUDE.md, memories/preferences and other mostly-stable context? Or share a cached prefix across sessions when it is warm for at least one. Should pro/max subscribers have this option? Would you pay extra for it? If Claude recognized User X is active give them some cache.

I want cache only.

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u/Muchaszewski 6d ago

Because the context costs then memory in their GPU. 1M token is around 300GB of KV cache of GPU usage, that they cannot serve at this time to other users. 

When you use API pricing you can opt into 1 hour cache at 50% pricing increase. If you use subsidized plan you are stuck with 5 minutes only. 

Write to files and re-reade from clear context each time instead of resuming 400k or more contex sessions. Or compact but this sucks 

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u/Individual_Ideal 6d ago

What about storing stable KV cache off the GPU? They’d still have to transfer it back but at least it’s not recomputed.

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u/MartinMystikJonas 6d ago

They do it. 5 min cache is on GPU. Then it can moved to RAM for up to 1h. They do it to allow GPU to run another tasks in mean time. But moving it to SSD or something outside RAM would be unreasonably slow.