Ox Alpha

ThinkingTwo issues: or treats falsy cached values (0, “”, []) as misses and re-fetches; and nothing ever writes to cache, so the “stale” data must come from fetch itself — likely a module-level connection reused across requests. Check both.

The bug is in the or: any falsy cached value is treated as a miss. Also, cache is never populated. Use an explicit membership check and store results:

def get(k):
    if k not in cache:      # explicit miss check
        cache[k] = fetch(k)   # actually populate
    return cache[k]

If results still look stale, the culprit is fetch reusing a connection with read-consistency lag — want me to look at it?