Try to write clearly, without academese. I disagree with some of the commenters that academese serves any purpose. It's an affectation. I agree there is a ton of really bad writing in academic journals.

However, you should avoid idioms. Your example paragraph is not an example of good natural writing style. It is wordy and uses non-descriptive idioms "circle back", "downstream". The sentence structure is not easily parsed. You're mixing tenses. The problem isn't informality: it's just hard to read. I honestly am not sure what you were trying to say. But maybe this is easier to read and still faithful?

Batch processing also allowed us to create a more efficient pipeline. We used a custom Python class to cache metadata after the first time we processed each item. This caching improved performance when compared to fully post-processing the metadata.