Recommender systems aim to substantially reduce information overload by suggesting lists of similar items that users may find interesting. Caching has been a useful technique for reducing stress on limited resources and improving response time. In this paper, we propose an ‘active caching’ technique for recommender systems based on a partial order approach that not only benefits from popularity and temporal locality, but also exploits spatial locality. This approach allows the processing of answers to neighboring non-cached queries in addition to the reporting of cached query results. Test results for several data sets and recommendation techniques show substantial improvement in the cache hit ratio and computational costs, while achieving reasonable recall rates.