12.9. High traffic mode

Every time a catalog page is viewed, each file in an [include] tag must be loaded from disk. In a test situation, this takes no noticeable amount of time. But on a busy Interchange server, this can slow your system.

You can switch to a high-traffic mode that doesn't require each template piece to be read from disk every time the page is loaded. Instead, all of the pieces are read into variables once when Interchange is started and they remain in memory until Interchange is restarted. On very busy Interchange catalogs, this can increase your speed noticeably. The only drawback is that you need to restart the Interchange daemon when you make changes to the template pieces in order to have the changes take effect. You can set up high-traffic templates by changing the Variable directives in catalog.cfg as follows:

  Variable TOP    <top
  Variable LEFT   <left
  Variable BOTTOM <bottom