# Caching System

Pootle uses a caching system to improve performance. It is an essential part of your Pootle installation. It is based on Django’s caching system, and is used for various things:

- To serve cached (possibly slightly outdated) versions of most pages to anonymous users to reduce their impact on server performance.
- To cache bits of the user interface, even for logged in users. Data will not be out of date but Pootle still tries to use the cache to reduce the impact on server performance.
- To store the result of expensive calculations like translation statistics.
- To keep track of last update timestamps to avoid unnecessary and expensive file operations (for example don’t attempt to save translations before a download if there are no new translations).

Without a well functioning cache system, Pootle could be slow.

## Named Caches

Pootle is configured with a these named caches:

- `'default'` – all non specified cache data and all Django cache data.
- `'redis'` – all RQ data related and revision counter.
- `'lru'` – all lru cache data.

In large installations you may want to setup separate caches to improve cache performance. You can then setup caching parameters for each cache separately.

## Cache Backends

Django supports multiple cache backends (methods of storing cache data). However, Redis is the only cache backend supported by Pootle. We use some custom features of Redis so cannot support other backends. You can customise the Redis cache settings by overriding the value of `CACHES` in your configuration file.