Inside Coldfusion MX

In this chapter we've examined several ways in which you can utilize caching methods to improve overall application performance.

You've discovered that you have opportunities to implement a caching strategy at just about every point on the path of a typical ColdFusion request.

By setting your template cache size appropriately, you can ensure that the ColdFusion Server doesn't need to repeat compilation work on templates that have already been processed.

By turning on the Trusted cache setting, you enable the ColdFusion engine to trust the compiled copy of the CFML template that resides in template cache, without having to check on the disk to see if a more recent copy of the source code is available.

With query caching, you can remove the need for ColdFusion to make multiple trips to a database for content that isn't going to change very often. The ColdFusion Administrator provides you with a way to control the maximum number of cached queries that you can store in server memory at any given time.

Finally, you can control caching at a page-based level, by using CFCACHE and other custom tags to write out the HTML content produced by execution of CFML tags. Thus, the next time those pages are invoked, ColdFusion itself won't have to do any processing at all.

By using these strategies to improve the overall performance of your web applications, you free up valuable server resources for other tasks. With those extra resources, perhaps you might want to take time to explore how you might integrate your ColdFusion application with other technologies. This, coincidentally, is what we begin to explore in Chapter 19, "Introduction to XML and ColdFusion MX."