Vision
Caching in Microsoft Office Server 2007 - Beta1TR
April 24, 2006
SharePoint Products and Technologies (SPPT) 2003 brought us a new type of cache: the web part cache. Microsoft Office Server (MOS) 2007 will incorporate Web Content Management (WCM) and with it, we will be getting a couple of new types of cache, originally stemming from Content Management Server (CMS). This post provides a short overview of caching in MOS 2007. The types of cache discussed in this post are part of WCM (which is a part of MOS 2007). You will not find these types of caching in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2007.
The Content Query cache stores cross list queries in memory. The Navigation Node cache stores information about SharePoint webs and pages, for example, the web title is something that is stored in memory. ACL information will be a part of the Content Query and Navigation Node caches. The Page Item cache stores the page itself in memory. The Root Web cache is used internally by SharePoint components.
The Page output cache directive cannot be used inline within SPPT. The SafeMode parser will generate a compile error if you do. You should use the previous types of caching for high traffic sites, not for sites that are accessed infrequently. Excellent examples of sites that are accessed infrequently are MySite sites.
You can enable the debug cache to, well, debug caching. Enabling debug cache results in page output in the form of a HTML comment that contains the pages timestamp as well as information about the sorts of caches used to generate the page.