Cache Management
A cache is a small amount of memory, holding recently accessed data, designed to speed up subsequent access to the same data. In the case of FarCry content management, a template cache is a fragment of HTML.
By holding these fragments in memory and putting them into the web page we can vastly improve the speed of the web pages delivery as we don't have to work out where all the content is coming from each and every time.
You can set up Template caches by adding the "cache" tag from the webskin library to sections of your projects display templates. Cache management is only relevant if you have these optional templating options in place.
Setting up caches is a developer's task.
Content Cache Summary
Block
The cache block is like a category of caches. It represents a collection of caches that you can act on all at once, fro example, cleaning or flushing.
Expired Caches
Expired caches are those caches that will be refreshed the next time a user hits the relevant section of the website. The system can't remove an expired cache from memory unless you ask it to or it goes through the process of checking to see if the cache has expired and rebuild it. The latter only occurs if a person hits the relevant section of the website.
Expired caches just use up memory until they are rebuilt with more recent content. Ordinarily this is not an issue. However, you may want to "clean" the expired caches and recover the memory if you have a very large number of caches. This process can be set up as a scheduled task if required.
Clean
Cleaning is really just recovering memory from expired caches.
Flush
Flushing a cache is a fancy word for deleting the cache. Deleting a cache simply means that it will be rebuilt the next time a person requests the relevant section of the website. It's something you might want to do if you have recently updated content and you want to make sure that the website is showing the very latest information.
Content Cache Detail
Drilling down on a content cache block or category shows all of the specific caches in that block. From here you can individually delete cache items, or drill down further to see the actual fragment of HTML in the cache.
This is probably more useful for developers than for administrators or contributors.
Q. When in "designmode", what do the numbers represent?
For example:
<<< Content Cache start (_body_CA9F4090-B0D0-E16E-5B0158F9D9FD2779) :::: (timeout 15:00)>>>
The period of time the cache will remain in place before it is recreated.
Q. What if I just want to preview my content? Do I have to worry about the cache?
When you request "Preview" from a content items overview page, any template caching on that page is automatically flushed.
Q. Is there any other way to flush the cache on a specific page?
Yes. If you are logged in to FarCry and can see the "floater menu" in the top left hand corner of the screen, you can select "Show Latest" to flush caches on pages you are browsing.