The number of forks of a project doesn't change very frequently and
running a COUNT(*) every time this information is requested can be quite
expensive. We also end up running such a COUNT(*) query at least twice
on the homepage of a project.

By caching this data and refreshing it when necessary we can reduce
project homepage loading times by around 60 milliseconds (based on the
timings of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce).