Smarty

[bsmith]

Anyone have a suggestion as to how often to call clear_compiled_tpl? Not sure of the performance impact to the user that hits a page with this call.

Should I create some automated too that call it using wget or something.

I would like to know how others are doing this.

Thanks,
Brian

[idxman01]

If you have $compile_check on, then it'll recompile it automatically. Otherwise, only call it if you changed a template.

-r

[boots]

?? only as often as required, preferably never on a production site.

It is NOT a tuning feature. It is a maintenance feature which works as idxman01 indicates.

[bsmith]

What I would like to do is manage the growing list of sub-directoreis under templates_c directory, do I need to "clean these out" by hand, or will the list keep growing indefinitely?

Maybe I'm not using compile_check correctly. Even in a production application, templates will eventually get changed when new features are added or design changes are desired. When this happens, do I turn on compile_check for a while, then turn it back off once the changes are re-compiled?

Please help if you can.
Brian

[boots]

why? Those are Smarty working files. They aren't meant to be managed other than for the needs of your application.

As for your question regarding turning on/off the compile check, I'd say yes: if you know before hand when it is appropriate to turn off/on, then do so. Typically, I keep different setting for my different environments:

1) production -- speed! no compile check, caching where possible.
2) testing -- same as production
3) development -- compile check, no caching, debug console

because of the design of my site, I typically just wipe out my temporary directories when I am doing a site update to ensure that everything is recompiled and cached properly.

HTH

[bsmith]

How do you wipe out your temporary files? Here is how I have my setup

root (public html)
-member (private app area)
--classes
--templates
--templates_c

That's about it, all my templates are in the templates directory, and I keep out browsers using my apache config. Smarty creates all compiled subs under templates_c by default I guess.

What do you do when you post new code/templates to your production site?
(all this is helping a lot, I appreciate it).

TIA,
Brian

[messju]

see
http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/api.clear.compiled.tpl.php
on how to clear them smarty-wise.

in a perfect world you don't have to worry about them, they get recompiled (and rewritten) when a template changes. this "changes" should imply an upload of any template to your production site.

[boots]

As messju kindly points out, there are programmatic controls available.

What I do is slightly different. My compile and cache directories are stored as sub-directories of a single directory (let's say, tmp) and I physically destroy tmp when I do a site refresh. That is not always desirable or necessary, though. Like anything worth considering, it depends on your context and what you are trying to achieve. Never-the-less, unless you have specific application logic that is dependant on the existance of your compile/cache files (which is extrememly unlikely), there is no harm in my approach what-so-ever. At WORST, your site will temporarily slow down as Smarty re-compiles templates and re-caches content.

I consider these things a maintenance issue and so I don't have code in my application to deal with them--instead I have maintenance scripts that handle those chores for me outside the confines of the application. I'm a little too old to be doing everything by the seat of my pants, I'm afraid

The key: most of the settings that were discussed earlier are set-and-forget. You typically only need to (temporarily) change them when a physical change actually occurs to your templates and or application. In other words, this is a fairly mundane topic If you still have questions, please consider posting a more specific example.

Take care and have fun!
xo boots

[bsmith]

I think I understand, and i, like you, have created tools that clean up directories/tables/files running as cron jobs.

Don't compile check (for speed)
Get rid of compile and cache to cause an application to re-compile and re-cache

That's basically it, and what I'm going to do.
Thanks so much for the help.

Brian

[idxman01]