This technique was developed in the Ruby community and is a great way to approach caching partial views. In Ruby rendering views is more expensive than PHP, but this technique is worth understanding as it could be applied to data models and not just views. In the Ruby world Russian Doll caching is synonymous with key-based expiration caching. I think it's useful to rather view the approach as being the blend of two ideas. That's why I introduce key-based expiration separately. Personally I think Russian Dolls are a bit of a counter-intuitive analogy. Real life Russian Dolls each contain one additional doll, but the power of this technique rests on the fact that "dolls" can contain many other "dolls". I find the easiest way to think about it is to say that if a child node is invalidated then its siblings and their children are not affected. When the parent is regenerated those sibling nodes do not need to be rendered again. Cache Invalidation ...