Caching Ruby on Rails

Learn how to make your Ruby on Rails app faster with caching, including a practical example.

Caching Ruby on Rails

Caching is an important part of any web application. It can help make your application more responsive and improve its overall performance. In Ruby on Rails, caching is typically done with the Action Pack gem. Action Pack is an abstraction layer that sits between your application and the web server. It provides a number of features, including caching.

Caching in Rails is done using the cache method. This method takes a block of code and stores it in memory for future requests. The code block is evaluated each time a request is made, and the results are stored in memory and used for subsequent requests. This can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to process a request. Here is an example of using the cache method to cache a result from a database query:

User.cache do
  # Query the database
  User.where(name: "John")
end

The cache method will execute the code block and store the results in memory. Subsequent requests will use the cached result instead of querying the database again. This can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to process a request.

The cache method can also be used to cache entire views. This can be done by passing the :view option to the method. Here is an example of using the cache method to cache a view:

cache(:view => "users/index") do
  # Render the view
  render :template => "users/index"
end

Caching views can be especially useful if the view is expensive to render. It can also be used to cache the entire page, which can be done by passing the :page option to the cache method. Here is an example of using the cache method to cache an entire page:

cache(:page => "users/index") do
  # Render the page
  render :template => "users/index"
end

Caching is an important part of any web application, and Ruby on Rails makes it easy to implement. The cache method can be used to store results from database queries and entire views or pages in memory. This can help reduce the amount of time it takes to process a request and improve the overall performance of your application.