Caching is a great way to speed up performance, but some situations mean that you will be either continually invalidating the content (which means you'll need more server resources) or serving stale content. Neither scenario is ideal, but there's an easy way to get a good compromise between performance and functionality.
With microcaching, you can set the timeout to be as low as one second. While this may not sound like a lot, if you're running a popular site, then trying to dynamically serve 50+ requests per second can easily bring your server to its knees. Instead, microcaching will ensure that the majority of your requests (that is, 49 out of the 50) are served direct from cache, yet will only be 1 second old.