Under most circumstances, which scenario will run faster?

• A. Running a workspace with feature caching enabled
• B. Running a workspace with partial runs
• C. Running a workspace with logging turned off
• D. Running a workspace with feature caching disabled

Answer: (D)

Feature caching adds overhead because the system must write features to a cache, manage cache metadata, and later read from it as the workflow progresses. That extra work can slow things down unless the cached data is reused many times or across multiple steps. In most workflows, especially linear ones where each feature is read and transformed once, the cost of creating and maintaining the cache outweighs the benefits, so running without the cache is faster.

So, disabling feature caching avoids the extra I/O and cache management, allowing features to stream straight through with lower latency. If a workspace really reuses the same features in multiple places or performs expensive transformations multiple times on the same data, caching can help in those cases, but that’s not the common scenario. Turning off caching is generally the faster choice. Turning off logging or doing partial runs can influence performance too, but their impact is typically smaller than the caching overhead in ordinary workflows.