Eschew Obfuscation: Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching

Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching

Max Dunn — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:02:00 -0700

Ruby on Rails (RoR or Rails) has some cool caching mechanisms already built in. You can cache parts of pages (fragment caching) or whole pages (action caching) while still going into your Rails code to check for permissions or do other things. However, for the highest performance, you can use page caching which serves the web page without even starting Rails, making it incredibly fast. For instance, on my slow computer, doing action caching was 2 times faster than normal, but doing page caching was 30 times faster! (See Ruby on Rails Caching Benchmarks).

However, the problem I ran into was that when you are logged into my wiki as an editor, you see an “Edit” link on each section of the page, and if you are logged in as an admin, you see an “Admin” choice on the menu. So while the Rails action caching would work fine for this, I couldn’t use the Rails out-of-the-box page caching since if I was logged in as an Editor and browsed through the pages, the next person that looked at the pages would still see all the “Edit” links, even if they were not logged in!

After some thought, I came up with two solutions for solving this problem. The first was based on rewriting the URL depending on what role the user is logged in as. I then came up with a better method that relies on setting a cookie with the current role and then using Javascript to modify the page appropriately. Here are the details on both methods.

"Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching" by feedogator

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:09:11 -0700

thanks

"Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching" by mattc

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:55:35 -0800

we use ajax to handle this. That way, you can page cache the main page, and use rails for the customized portions that need rails and access to the cookies. All you need to do is add a onload hook to the body page to load your customized bits

"Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching" by David

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:41:31 -0800

On ror have a post about caching web pages.

"Ruby on Rails Advanced Page Caching" by Edward

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:02:24 -0800

Hi, I found this interesting because I have done some work on conditional page cache use in one of my projects.

My method is similar to your second one, but it uses the cookie at the webserver level rather than in javascript, so public users get the cached page and logged in users get a Rails rendered page.