Some time ago I wrote about some changes to make large catalogs more performant. Today a second batch of changes got committed (sorry, forgot to push, though!).

What does that mean?

First of all, this was in collaboration with a developer facing issues with a large database, in particular categories. So, talking to me does occasionally help getting your problems solved faster!

Secondly, there is now a new interface ZMSavantCache and a also a simple implementation class thereof. There is also sample code of how to configure Savant to use the cache class and how to configure the cache class itself.

All there is to do is:

1. Change the bean definition of the default view class to set the caching implementation to be used
2. Set up a new setting that lists all the template filenames (for example: ‘boxes/categories.php’) that can be cached
3. Done!

Eventually this should be the default setup with some reasonable defaults (perhaps with a more sophisticated cache implementation, though).

This template file level caching is a great way to complement the existing page cache plugin. In the above example of a catalog with thousands of categories, caching the categories box cut of about 4 seconds of processing (measured inside a VM, to be fair).

In addition I finally managed to get APC working on my dev environment (Windows, go figure…), so there is also a shiny new APC cache implementation to go with that

And, again, all that just because someone started asking questions and suggested solutions and patches.

You are welcome.