Custom Component Caching

Question

I have a custom realty / information component written for a military related website. There are roughly 220 military installations that are covered by my component and for each installation I am offering the same layouts with installation specific data for each. My question is about proper caching. We currently have about 450k properties in the database, each property has a key field that dictates which installation that property should display for. Some of the larger installations may have 6-7k properties for that single base.

I have caching turned on for my site but my question is whether or not page caching in Joomla, or the com_content caching is covering my custom component.

I guess the meat and potatoes of this question is this: Should I be including methods to cache my custom component pages / layouts or does Joomla automatically cache these as page caches? If I do need to include caching code for my component can you point me in the direction I need to be going in to include caching.

Answer 1

From the testing I have done it looks like page caching does not distinguish between elements in a layout. For example: a search form on a page that uses session variables to populate the fields once a search has taken place. The search itself does not return new values when the form is submitted, neither does the model. I can see where caching static content would work as expected, but for dynamic filterable content I do not believe caching will work.

Maybe a future version of Joomla will allow specific methods / functions to be skipped in caching, but for now I do not see another way around this.