When is the cache updated in the ContentQueryWebPart (CrossListQueryCache)?

Question

I have been looking into the CrossListQueryCache object and ContentQueryWebPart (CQWP) as part of the Microsoft Publishing infrastructure (SharePoint). The CQWP uses the CrossListQueryCache.

The CrossListQueryCache appears to use the CacheManager and CachedObjectFactory to determine when to use the cache or not. My reflector skills aren't cutting it right now, but my guess is that the cache is cleared whenever any updates are made to the site. Is this right?

I'm hoping that this can be tweaked in some way. In fact, it would be nice if we could update the cache only through a SharePoint job.

Answer 1

You can configure the cache settings from Object Cache settings page. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101577831033.aspx

We ran into a lot of problems using CrossListQueryCache under load with a really large SharePoint Content DB (> 100 GB). What we saw was a lot of database locking.

Also there are times when the cache is NOT used even though you have configured it to be turned on. I created a pretty detail blog post about it a year ago here.