Did you clear the cache? A Contextual Tour of Rendering Efficiently

Rob Powell & Stephen Lucero

Drush cr… drush cr… drush cr!!! We all know the scenario where you’ve made a change to the site, but when you load the page it just doesn’t seem to show. Oftentimes the solution is to clear your cache and move on, but why is that?

In this session we’ll explore how that cache is built and used. What determines when a page can be cached, and how does Drupal know when to rebuild it? How does Drupal know when to rebuild parts of a page without rebuilding everything?

Drupal 8 introduced a whole new methodology for caching: Cache tags and contexts. Using and maintaining these effectively will make your life easier and your clients love you. We will go over real life examples and show best practices to keep your caches up to date.

Level of Knowledge Needed
Attendees should be comfortable with back-end development and/or theme-level development using render arrays.
Topics to be Discussed
Throughout this session we’ll explore:

Caching layers in Drupal
Existing and custom cache contexts and tags
Maintaining cache data throughout rendering
Caching during development
Using cache tags with proxies (Varnish, CDN, etc.)
Session Takeaways
Attendees to this session will walk away with:

An understanding of how cache tags and contexts are used in Drupal 8
A view into Drupal’s rendering process and how caching data bubbles through the render caches
A framework of questions to determine when cache tags or contexts are needed

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