Big or small, once your app goes to production you’d better start thinking about utilizing view caching ;)
Granted, view caching in a dynamic application can be tricky or impossible(?)…
but with proper usage wherever and whenever needed, it can make your app go off the charts in terms of performance.
If you are not familiar with view caching at all, you should read the CakePHP manual… yet I will give you some basic examples and couple of things that may not be so well known.
1. Enable view caching for 10 minutes for the main (index) page
$this->helpers[] = 'Cache';
$this->cacheAction = '10 minutes';
}
In this little snippet we’ll add the Cache helper, only when required by the given action. No need to load for the entire controller. (Once the page is “visited” for the first time, the given view will be cached… you can see the evidence of this in your app/tmp/cache/views directory).
2. Be mindful of what you are caching, certain things should remain dynamic
Whenever there is dynamic content within the the view, such as a div, which is updated by AJAX, for example, you’d want to utilize the cake:nocache tags, like so:
… but there are a few “gotchas” to be aware of…
a. Callbacks such as beforeRender() or beforeFilter() do not fire by default.
For larger scale apps this nearly kills the ability to use view caching.
However, not all is lost… In your controller you can setup a property to ensure that callbacks do run for certain actions where they are truly required (as shown in CakePHP manual):
Additional option proposed by jrbasso, is to fire-up the necessary logic by adding the following snippet to the layout:
Still a little overhead, but much much much faster overall. Both options achieve the same basic goal and I will leave it up to you to see, which one suits your needs better.
b. Spaces
Another excellent catch by mr. jrbasso is that if you have spaces between your cake:nocache and php tags, the “no-caching features” may not work as expected.
So be sure to always place your dynamic PHP code like so:
c. Don’t surround your elements with cake:nocache tags.
Your entire element will not be cached by doing this:
Yep, you have to go inside the element and decide what to cache or what not to cache. Which, in some cases makes sense, depends on the element really.
Alternatively, you can cache an entire element using the ‘cache’ key:
Since the element itself can have dynamic content, the ‘key’ can be used to create different “versions” of the cached element. Of course in the above example it is a static key, but in other cases you could create a dynamic key based on some conditions or criteria, which would make sense for your application.
Real-time updates vs view caching
It goes without saying that once your view is cached any changes to the underlying model will not be reflected until the cache is invalidated. In some cases it is perfectly fine, in others you might want to clear the cache once the model has been updated.
It is quite easily achieved by adding the following to your model:
clearCache('related_view*');
}
Granted, on the first hit to the page the cache will be rebuilt and some “extra” weight will be put on the application, yet by using this technique you’ll have the benefit of using the cache and real-time reflection of the updated data.
Don’t let APC get in the way
I am not sure if other PHP opcode engines can cause the same trouble, but at least with APC we’ve found that it can conflict with cake’s view caching. It would be a bit too much to go into details of the issue, but if you use both APC and view caching for your application and notice some strange behavior be sure to run APC with stat “ON” (which is the default behavior).
To learn a little more about this, you can take a look here
In summary I might as well throw this out: when comparing framework performance, using examples such as “Hello world!” don’t forget that any framework or application requires caching. As many other things, ensuring high-availability and excellent performance is quite easy in cake, and beyond that be sure to utilize other tools (APC, memcached, etc.), which are just as necessary in any modern web application as a web server itself.