I’ve been playing about with configuration options in the Template Toolkit to try to improve the performance of a site I maintain.
I’ve been focusing on the caching and compiling options in particular.
By setting the COMPILE_DIR and COMPILE_EXT options, Template Toolkit automatically compiles all the templates it uses to the specified directory. Once they are compiled, Template Toolkit will try to use them instead of the original template wherever possible. This seems to be giving some real speed increases and also reducing the load on the server.
my $template = Template->new({
COMPILE_DIR => '/tmp/compiled_templates',
COMPILE_EXT => '.ttc',
});
Here we are storing our compiled templates in the /tmp/compiled_templates directory. Template Toolkit replicates the directory structure of the original template under this automatically. We’re also saying we want all compiled templates to end in the file extension .ttc.
It definately seems to be a quick win for improving the performance of Template Toolkit based sites.