Django Caching for Faster and Smoother Web Apps

Caching is a way to temporarily store data in memory or on disk to speed up the performance of a web application.

In Django, caching can be used to store frequently-used data in memory so that it can be quickly accessed without having to hit the database or perform expensive calculations.

To use caching in Django, you’ll need to configure a cache backend. Django supports a variety of cache backends, including in-memory caching, file-based caching, and cache servers like Memcached and Redis.

Along with support for a custom backend, Django has a number of built-in caching backends.

The pre-installed choices are:

Memcached is a memory-based key-value storage for brief data bursts. Multiple servers’ worth of distributed caching are supported.

Database: It is used to store the cache pieces in this instance. A Django admin command can be used to construct a table for that purpose. Although it isn’t the fastest caching type, it can be helpful for storing sophisticated database queries.

Once you’ve configured a cache backend, you can use Django’s cache framework to store and retrieve data from the cache. The cache framework provides a simple API for storing and retrieving data using cache keys.

To store data in the cache, you can use the set method of the cache object. This method takes a cache key, the data to store, and an optional timeout (in seconds). For example:

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.http import HttpResponse

def my_view(request):
    data = get_expensive_data()
    cache.set('expensive_data', data, 3600)
    return HttpResponse('Data cached')

To retrieve data from the cache, you can use the get method of the cache object. This method takes a cache key and returns the data stored under that key, or None at all  if the key is not found in the cache. For example:

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.http import HttpResponse

def my_view(request):
    data = cache.get('expensive_data')
    if data is None:
        data = get_expensive_data()
        cache.set('expensive_data', data, 3600)
    return HttpResponse(data)

Using caching can greatly improve the performance of your Django application by reducing the number of database queries and expensive calculations that need to be performed. However, it is very important for one to keep in mind that the cache is not a permanent storage solution and that data in the cache can expire or be evicted to make room for new data.