I work creating and maintaining websites and applications. Seems like everything on the ‘net gets cached at some point. It can be a real P.I.T.A. to keep track of where cache is created, when to clean it and when to leave it alone.
Some of the sites I care for are CMS based. Don’t get me wrong, I think CMS’s are great. They save a lot of time and keep the content separate from the design elements. Which makes life easier. Some however, have caching built-in. And the built-in caching actually works from a performance stand-point. What bites, is the necessity to periodically clean the cache. With tens of thousands of cache files, just getting the cache display page to load takes forever. Deleting the files takes time too and it’s never a single-pass operation.
Also many sites are PHP based. PHP can be setup to cache as well. Can’t say I’ve had a problem with PHP’s caching system, nor have I found it necessary to clean that cache content. Kudos to the PHP implementation.
When we deal with the web we also have to remember the browser caches pages too. That’s ok, so long as the page never changes or the user knows how to clear their cache when a page reloads with old data. Personally, I change the cache settings in my browser to keep cache for a very short period of time. It helps me avoid the <control><reload> (or <control><refresh> in IE) thing. In my life, I need to see a lot pages after changes and cache gets in my way.
Cache has it’s value, it helps make the browsing experience faster. But, they’re little trails of dirt. At some point, it has to be cleaned-up.
