This article discusses only the caching of dynamic content like product selections, filters, calculation results, etc. The caching of static content, which does not change during store deployments, like CSS, Images, and Javascript files, is not covered here.

Caching is one of the most effective ways of improving the performance of web applications of all kinds. X-Cart 5 employs various types of data caching at many levels within the system. However, you have to choose the most appropriate cache driver to get the maximum performance gain.

X-Cart application gives you the following options for the data caching mechanism:

File system caching should be good for most stores. The most advanced of the above options is Redis.

You can select the cache driver manually by setting the type option in the [cache] section inside <X-Cart dir>/etc/config.php

When choosing the cache options, you have to consider the amount of data in your store and the overall customer traffic. The cached content can be divided into public and personal parts:

If your store contains lots of products and categories (we are talking about hundreds of thousands of products), cached content can quickly take up all the available space (it can take gigabytes). Such cache will be ineffective if space is limited because X-Cart will have to constantly recalculate the same data, unable to cache it all.

Another problem is cache lookup speed - the caching mechanism has to be fast enough to make a performance difference. If it is brilliant to perform optimal eviction of the unused cached content, it will be slower than simpler mechanisms. So, the matter of things is that you cannot simultaneously have a cache that is small and quick at the same time; you have to choose one single aspect.

If your server has large disk space and SSD drives, and your store has less than 100000 products, we recommend using file system cache because it is the quickest option. You will only have to configure a periodic cleanup of the cache folder at the moment of the lowest customer traffic (for example, at midnight).

When you have a relatively small store or a big amount of RAM available on the server, Memcached is the ultimate option because it has built-in eviction of the most outdated data. It is also fast enough if the data amount is not large. You can also try to configure Memcached to use the swap partition if you do not have much RAM.

If your store has millions of products, the solution has to be custom-tailored to your needs. Contact X-Cart, and we will definitely find the most efficient solution for you.

File system caching is the simplest solution; it stores the serialized, cached objects on the filesystem inside the X-Cart application directory (<X-Cart>/var/datacache, to be specific).

Please note that you will have to configure a periodic cleaning of the datacache directory. Otherwise, your storage space will eventually run full, and the server will fail.

We suggest adding a task via the crontab shell program (on UNIX-based systems), e.g.:

This example task cleans up any files older than 7 days and is scheduled to run on an hourly basis (at minute 0 of every hour).

Here’s an explanation of the find command parameters:

You can find more info about setting up cron tasks here.

Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Redis needs to be installed on the server and requires some configuration in etc/config.php:

Redis PHP extension is required.

Memcached is a free and open-source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Memcached has to be installed as a PHP extension. You can find more info here.

Also, you’ll have to specify type=memcached and list your memcached servers at the [cache] section in the <X-Cart dir>/etc/config.php file like this: