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authorAditya <aditya@sublucid.com>2008-09-15 00:01:10 -0400
committerAditya <aditya@sublucid.com>2008-09-15 00:01:10 -0400
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Added first draft of caching guide; advanced caching is still being worked on
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+Caching with Rails: An overview
+===============================
+
+Everyone caches. This guide will teach you what you need to know about
+avoiding that expensive round-trip to your database and returning what you
+need to return to those hungry web clients in the shortest time possible.
+
+Specifically, this guide is split into two parts:
+
+- Basic Caching
+- Advanced Caching
+
+- Basic Caching
+ * Page Caching
+ * Action Caching
+ * Fragment Caching
+ * Cache Sweeping
+ * SQL Caching
+ * Cache stores
+
+- Advanced Caching
+ * Fragment Caching with interlock and memcached
+ * Model Caching with cache_fu and memcached
+ * Things you wish you didn't know
+
+== Basic Caching
+
+This is an introduction to the three types of caching techniques that Rails
+provides by default without the use of any third party plugins.
+
+To get started make sure Base.perform_caching is set to true for your
+environment.
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+Base.perform_caching = true
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+=== Page Caching
+
+Page caching is a Rails mechanism which allows the request for a generated
+page to be fulfilled by the webserver, without ever having to go through the
+Rails stack at all. Obviously, this is super fast. Unfortunately, it can't be
+applied to every situation (such as pages that need authentication) and since
+the webserver is literally just serving a file from the filesystem, cache
+expiration is an issue that needs to be dealt with.
+
+So, how do you enable this super-fast cache behavior? Simple, let's say you
+have a controller called ProductController and a 'list' action that lists all
+the products
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class ProductController < ActionController
+
+ caches_page :list
+
+ def list; end
+
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+The first time anyone requestsion products/list, Rails will generate a file
+called list.html and the webserver will then look for that file before it
+passes the next request for products/list to your Rails application.
+
+By default, the page cache directory is set to Rails.public_path (which is
+usually set to RAILS_ROOT + "/public") and this can be configured by changing
+the configuration setting Base.cache_public_directory
+
+The page caching mechanism will automatically add a .html exxtension to
+requests for pages that do not have an extension to make it easy for the
+webserver to find those pages and this can be configured by changing the
+configuration setting Base.page_cache_extension
+
+In order to expire this page when a new product is added we could extend our
+example controler like this:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class ProductController < ActionController
+
+ caches_page :list
+
+ def list; end
+
+ def create
+ expires_page :action => :list
+ end
+
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+If you want a more complicated expiration scheme, you can use cache sweepers
+to expire cached objects when things change. This is covered in the section on Sweepers.
+
+[More: caching paginated results? more examples? Walk-through of page caching?]
+
+=== Action Caching
+
+The issue with page caching is that you cannot use it for pages that require
+to restrict access somehow. This is where Action Caching comes in. Action
+Caching works like Page Caching except for the fact that the incoming web
+request does go from the webserver to the Rails stack and Action Pack so that
+before_filters can be run on it before the cache is served, so that
+authentication and other restrictions can be used while still serving the
+result of the output from a cached copy.
+
+Clearing the cache works in the exact same way as with Page Caching.
+
+Let's say you only wanted authenticated users to edit or create a Product
+object, but still cache those pages:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class ProductController < ActionController
+
+ before_filter :authenticate, :only => [ :edit, :create ]
+ caches_page :list
+ caches_action :edit
+
+ def list; end
+
+ def create
+ expires_page :action => :list
+ expire_action :action => :edit
+ end
+
+ def edit; end
+
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+[More: more examples? Walk-through of action caching from request to response?
+ Description of Rake tasks to clear cached files? Show example of
+ subdomain caching? Talk about :cache_path, :if and assing blocks/Procs
+ to expire_action?]
+
+=== Fragment Caching
+
+Life would be perfect if we could get away with caching the entire contents of
+a page or action and serving it out to the world. Unfortunately, dynamic web
+applications usually build pages with a variety of components not all of which
+have the same caching characteristics. In order to address such a dynamically
+created page where different parts of the page need to be cached and expired
+differently Rails provides a mechanism called Fragment caching.
+
+Fragment caching allows a fragment of view logic to be wrapped in a cache
+block and served out of the cache store when the next request comes in.
+
+As an example, if you wanted to show all the orders placed on your website in
+real time and didn't want to cache that part of the page, but did want to
+cache the part of the page which lists all products available, you could use
+this piece of code:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+<% Order.find_recent.each do |o| %>
+ <%= o.buyer.name %> bought <% o.product.name %>
+<% end %>
+
+<% cache do %>
+ All available products:
+ <% Product.find(:all).each do |p| %>
+ <%= link_to p.name, product_url(p) %>
+ <% end %>
+<% end %>
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+The cache block in our example will bind to the action that called it and is
+written out to the same place as the Action Cache, which means that if you
+want to cache multiple fragments per action, you should provide an action_path to the cache call:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+<% cache(:action => 'recent', :action_suffix => 'all_products') do %>
+ All available products:
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+and you can expire it using the expire_fragment method, like so:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+expire_fragment(:controller => 'producst', :action => 'recent', :action_suffix => 'all_products)
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+[More: more examples? description of fragment keys and expiration, etc? pagination?]
+
+=== Sweepers
+
+Cache sweeping is a mechanism which allows you to get around having a ton of
+expire_{page,action,fragment) calls in your code by moving all the work
+required to expire cached content into an asynchronous process that watches
+for changes to your models and implements callbacks to expire cached content.
+
+Continuing with our Product controller example, we could rewrite it with a
+sweeper such as the following:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class StoreSweeper < ActionController::Caching::Sweeper
+ observe Product # This sweeper is going to keep an eye on the Post model
+
+ # If our sweeper detects that a Post was created call this
+ def after_create(product)
+ expire_cache_for(product)
+ end
+
+ # If our sweeper detects that a Post was updated call this
+ def after_update(product)
+ expire_cache_for(product)
+ end
+
+ # If our sweeper detects that a Post was deleted call this
+ def after_destroy(product)
+ expire_cache_for(product)
+ end
+
+ private
+ def expire_cache_for(record)
+ # Expire the list page now that we added a new product
+ expire_page(:controller => '#{record}', :action => 'list')
+
+ # Expire a fragment
+ expire_fragment(:controller => '#{record}', :action => 'recent', :action_suffix => 'all_products')
+ end
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+Then we add it to our controller to tell it to call the sweeper when certain
+actions are called. So, if we wanted to expire the cached content for the list
+and edit actions when the create action was called, we could do the following:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class ProductController < ActionController
+
+ before_filter :authenticate, :only => [ :edit, :create ]
+ caches_page :list
+ caches_action :edit
+ cache_sweeper :store_sweeper, :only => [ :create ]
+
+ def list; end
+
+ def create
+ expires_page :action => :list
+ expire_action :action => :edit
+ end
+
+ def edit; end
+
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+[More: more examples? better sweepers?]
+
+=== SQL Caching
+
+Query caching is a Rails feature that caches the result set returned by each
+query so that if Rails encounters the same query again for that request, it
+will used the cached result set as opposed to running the query against the
+database again.
+
+For example:
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+class ProductController < ActionController
+
+ before_filter :authenticate, :only => [ :edit, :create ]
+ caches_page :list
+ caches_action :edit
+ cache_sweeper :store_sweeper, :only => [ :create ]
+
+ def list
+ # Run a find query
+ Product.find(:all)
+
+ ...
+
+ # Run the same query again
+ Product.find(:all)
+ end
+
+ def create
+ expires_page :action => :list
+ expire_action :action => :edit
+ end
+
+ def edit; end
+
+end
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+In the 'list' action above, the result set returned by the first
+Product.find(:all) will be cached and will be used to avoid querying the
+database again the second time that finder is called.
+
+Query caches are created at the start of an action and destroyed at the end of
+that action and thus persist only for the duration of the action.
+
+=== Cache stores
+
+Rails provides different stores for the cached data for action and fragment
+caches. Page caches are always stored on disk.
+
+The cache stores provided include:
+
+1) Memory store: Cached data is stored in the memory allocated to the Rails
+ process
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+ActionController::Base.cache_store = :memory_store
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+2) File store: Cached data is stored on the disk, this is the default store
+ and the default path for this store is: /tmp/cache
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+ActionController::Base.cache_store = :file_store, "/path/to/cache/directory"
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+3) DRb store: Cached data is stored in a separate DRb process that all servers
+communicate with
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+ActionController::Base.cache_store = :drb_store, "druby://localhost:9192"
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+4) MemCached store: Cached data is stored using a high-speed caching server
+called memcached
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+ActionController::Base.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, "localhost"
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+5) Custom store: You can define your own cache store (new in Rails 2.1)
+
+[source, ruby]
+-----------------------------------------------------
+ActionController::Base.cache_store = MyOwnStore.new("parameter")
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+== Advanced Caching
+
+=== memcached and cache_fu
+=== memcached and interlock