1. A method comprising: receiving, from an application that performs operations on a plurality of objects, one or more indications of which objects, of the plurality of objects, have a particular designation; wherein the plurality of objects is persistently stored outside of an intermediate cache in data from disk blocks on one or more non-volatile storage devices; caching, in the intermediate cache, disk blocks that are transferred between (a) a volatile memory used by the application and (b) the one or more non-volatile storage devices; for a particular disk block that is transferred between the volatile memory and the one or more non-volatile storage devices, determining for which particular object, of the plurality of objects, the particular disk block stores data; wherein data representative of the particular object is persistently stored on a particular plurality of disk blocks on the one or more non-volatile storage devices; wherein caching the data includes using the intermediate cache, with respect to the particular disk block, in a manner that is based, at least in part, on whether the particular object for which the particular disk block stores data has said particular designation; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.