How do I cache a list/dictionary in Pylons?

Question

On a website I'm making, there's a section that hits the database pretty hard. Harder than I want. The data that's being retrieved is all very static. It will rarely change. So I want to cache it.

I came across http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonsdocs/Caching+in+Templates+and+Controllers and had a good read have been making use of template caching using:

return render('tmpl.html', cache_expire='never')

That works great until I modify the HTML. The only way I've found to delete the cache is to remove the cache_expire parameter from render() and delete the cache folder. But, meh, it works.

What I want to be able to, however, is cache Lists, Tuples and Dictionaries. From reading the above wiki page, it seems this isn't possible?

I want to be able to do something like:

data    = [i for i in range(0, 2000000)]
mycache = cache.get_cache('cachename')

value = mycache.get(key='dataset1', list=data, type='memory', expiretime='3600')

print value

Allowing me to do some CPU intensive work (list generation, in this example) and then cache it.

Can this be done with Pylons?

Answer 1

As alternative of traditional cache you can use app globals variables. Once on server startup load data to variable and then use data in you actions or direct in templates.

http://pylonsbook.com/en/1.1/exploring-pylons.html#app-globals-object

Also you can code some action to update this global variable through the admin interface or by other events.

Answer 2

Why not use memcached?
Look at this question on SO on how to use it with pylons: Pylons and Memcached