Stale (from the general English word meaning no longer fresh or current) is used in computing to describe data, processes, or resources that are outdated or no longer valid.
It often refers to cached data, code branches, sessions, or jobs that have not been updated for a while, and may no longer reflect the latest state of a system. Identifying stale resources is important to prevent errors, inefficiency, or confusion in development and operations.
Example
- A stale cache serves old content instead of the updated version of a webpage.
- A stale branch in Git is one that has not been updated with changes from the main branch for a long time.