Hi James,

I do appreciate your comments and I was not aware of the caching
capabilities built into rails. I will take a look into the link you
provided to see how I can utilize this built in support.

Thanks again,
Paul

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Aug 19, 2006, at 11:00 AM, Paul wrote:
>
> > I am coming from a Smalltalk background and we
> > would typically cache code/description lookup table rows into a class
> > variable for performance. That is, when we wanted to look up a
> > description we would check the cache first and then hit the database
> > only if it had not been retrieved yet.
>
> This smells like premature optimization to me.  You've timed it and
> it's too slow or you have users complaining about the speed?  If not,
> I worry you might be complicating this before you need to.
>
> You are right that in this case, it shouldn't hurt to use a class
> variable.  It is a waste of memory though and you may not get great
> cache hit rates.
>
> The right way to handle this is with Rails's cache support:
>
>    http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Caching.html
>
> This should be faster and more natural to implement, since you can
> develop normally and then apply caching as needed.  It will also work
> across interpreters.
>
> I'm not trying to tell you how to run your site.  I hope it doesn't
> sound like I am.  I'm just trying to help you avoid choices I'm
> pretty sure you will regret down the road.
> 
> Best of luck with your site.
> 
> James Edward Gray II