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Proposed by: Oliver Hader
Mentor: probably either Oliver Hader or Michael Stucki
Student working on it: -
Level: Medium

In general, websites using a CMS, consist of dynamic content. But in most cases these contents are always the same and won't change from one minute (or hour) to other. Thus, caching is the most common way to reduce a server's load and increase the performance. The current caching in TYPO3 is good, but not optimal since it still uses some database queries at each page impression. A better way is to use static files in the file system which can be delivered without any usage of the database storage.

Shipping TYPO3 with an integrated solution for delivering statically cached content, HTML files that is, would dramatically improve the performance of TYPO3 powered websites.

The current situation has the following issues:

• TYPO3 executes database queries even if the page is cached
• using caches in the file system is very, very fast compared to the current situation
• many script methods are involved (loaded and executed) even if the page content has not changed
• scripts are used for evaluation expiration of contents instead of functionalities of the webserver directly
• parts of conditions in the front-end require script actions

We are looking forward to a mechanism which can handle static file caching.

• avoid script involvement for most static content
• map the URI scheme (e.g. /category/topic/page.html) to the file system
• possibility to use this new technique out of the box for every situation
• enable evalutation of conditions in a reduced environment
• create meta informations for the cached contents (e.g. condition settings, expiration time, etc.)
• setup handlers for the webserver (e.g. using .htaccess files to define actions)

At good point to start would be to understand and analyze the current front-end rendering process and its caching mechanism and the possible modifications concerning front-end users and conditions. There is also an overview of the front-end rendering process available.

Knowledge in HTTP headers and mod_rewrite will probably be helpful.

Currently there is already a partly solution available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository. But this solution works only for some situations and needs lots of improvements.