Caching is not a performance strategy

Caching is the first thing everybody reaches for and the last thing that should be tuned. It makes the fast path faster and hides the slow path from you completely, until a logged-in user, a checkout or a search request walks straight past it.

Measure the uncached response first. That number is the truth about the site. If it is four seconds, you do not have a caching problem. You have four seconds of work happening on every request that nobody has looked at.

Fix the query. Then cache it, and enjoy the fact that when the cache misses, nothing catches fire.