Caching

Introduction | Performance | Settings

Introduction

O3 can use quite a lot of processor power because it's doing a lot of things. Getting lists of data out of the database and assembling it into displays (by parsing your containers) is a pretty quick process, but when there's a lot of items in the list, or the list contains hidden update forms (as in an 'owners' page - where all their listings are displayed & updated), it can take over a second to serve up the page.

To speed things up, O3 has a caching mechanism which stores lists of data on disk as a text file. When the same data is requested again, the file is served instead of re-processing the data. This can make a huge difference to O3's speed, and it always makes some difference. It worth monitoring page load times using the method described below.

Performance

Important Note: You can always see how long it takes your pages to load, by hovering the mouse over the 'Powered By OfficeTrio' text at the bottom of the page. This includes the entire page load time and is pretty accurate.

O3's page load times are usually between 0.03s and 1s. O3 will, by default, time out after 5 seconds because pages shouldn't take that long to load, and it places unreasonable demands on your webserver.

If you find your pages regularly take whole seconds to load, even when there's not that much stuff in them, it's probably because your webserver is busy servicing other accounts (as most people have use shared hosting).

You should enable caching in O3 as a matter of course - especially once the site is live - to speed your site up, and as a basic courtesy to other users of the computer.

Settings

All the cache settings are found in the Settings - under 'Cache'.

You can switch it on and off. You can also set the time files are cached for and the cache directory.

The cache directory must be world-writable as the files are written by the webserver account

Whenever things are updated or deleted, the appropriate cache files are automatically deleted ensuring what's displayed is always current.

You can delete the entire cache from the O3 Main Page