What is siteCache.idx.php for?

my siteCache.idx.php is currenty over 700Kb and I have no idea of what it is for (seems full of code-snippets, config vars, and other interesting things).

When I click ’[tt]Clear-cache[/tt]’ in the manager I get:

(why?)

should I delete it manually every now and then ??!?


ciao

No, don’t ever delete that file, as it is critical for every request. This contains a map of all the documents in your site, as well as the source code for all your chunks, snippets, and plugins. 700k tells me you either have a lot of documents (1000’s), or are keeping a lot of PHP code in your database (or both). There are some recent threads covering suggestions to include your php source code from external files to relieve the size of this file a bit.

Whenever something is saved and the cache cleared, this file is regenerated immediately.

I do have many Snippets hanging in there which I am not using;
could this affect performance? does MODx have to go trhought the file at each request ??!?

Definitely and yes, every request loads this file; this is one of the bottlenecks being addressed with the 0.9.7 rewrite.

wow I just posted about this for curiosity sake, but it’s getting interesting!

which are the threads you mentioned about moving the php code to external files ??!?

Another good source of snippet "best practices":

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Creating_Snippets

I cut the file-size from 750kb to 600kb by just removing various backup copies of Ditto and other snippet from my install;
both Fasterfox and Firebug (Firefox extensions) report slightly faster rendering-times already; I definitely have to go over my own snippets and apply all the good coding practices described in the wiki article, in particular:

• Snippets and plugins should not contain presentation layer code
• Only configuration settings in snippet code, use php include to include logic code
• Objectify Your Code

moreover it is important to keep only those snippets, chunks & plugins that you actually use in your publicly-accessible pages;
move all your tests and backups to a mirror install it’s pretty easy to go back and forth by FTP + MySQL exports/imports !

PS: this should all go into a ’performance’ page in the wiki... maybe I’ll start it over the weekend.