It was first formulated by Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu in 1985,[1][2] and then subsequently revised in 1997[3] and 2007[4] to reflect changes in the relative cost and performance of memory and persistent storage.
Although the 5-minute rule was invented in the realm of databases, it has also been applied elsewhere, for example, in Network File System cache capacity planning.
The disk-to-DRAM interval was thus a bit short of what Gray and Putzolu anticipated in 1987 as the "five-hour rule" was going to be in 2007 for RAM and disks.
There needed to be a 50-fold increase in page size to cache for break-even at five minutes."
"[7] In 2000, Gray and Shenoy applied a similar calculation for web page caching and concluded that a browser should "cache web pages if there is any chance they will be re-referenced within their lifetime.