Simple applications usually do not need caching but as an application grows more complex, it may need to employ caching strategies to speed up execution. Developers should try to avoid caching until it is necessary. Caching data can add complexity to an application, and that complexity has to be worth it. If an application is not experiencing any slowness, then its generally better to not implement caching.
Lucee has one of the most robust caching solutions and caching is available at every level, even in the language syntax itself. The right type of caching to use depends on the performance constraints of the particular application and the structure of the code. Typically, go for the easiest thing that works!
This section gives an overview of the available caching features.
##Template Caching Lucee can cache whole Lucee HTML templates so that they are only generated once, and then subsequent requests are from the cache
##Query Caching Lucee can cache SQL queries by reading the content of a SQL Statements and saving the results. It knows when the same query is requested, and it serves the data from the cache instead. This is like caching within the SQL server, but gives you control from within Lucee.
##Query of Queries Lucee can use SQL statements to re-query a recordset already held in memory. This is really useful when an application needs to continually query an initial record set (for example when filtering records repeatedly) and it would be expensive to make successive round trips to the database.
##Object Caching Lucee can cache any object or variable that into a configured cache, and you can be retrieved as needed.
##Function Caching Lucee has language level support for caching the results of functions based on the arguments supplied. This makes quick work of speeding up complex functions.
##Template Fragment Caching If only part of a Lucee template needs to be cached, but the remaining part needs to stay dynamic, this can be acheived with Template Fragment caching.
##Persistent Scope Caching Lucee implements a number of persistent variable scopes, Application, Session, Client, Cookie & cluster, which can be used for simple caching scenarios.
##ORM Caching The Lucee ORM supports caching ORM Entities to reduce load on the underlying datasource and speed up large number of entities
##RAM Disk Caching Lucee can load files (images, CSVs, videos, etc) into RAM disk and operate on those files in RAM which is significantly faster than the local file system in many cases.