Document Caches Overview and Best Practices

Document caches are created at run time or on a schedule and behave in a manner similar to report caches. At run time, document caches are created only in MicroStrategy Web. When you execute a prompted document in MicroStrategy Web, an XML document cache is generated. When you reprompt the document, a new XML cache is generated with the data reflecting new prompt answers.

To enable document caching, you must first enable report caching. For a specific document cache to be generated, all underlying dataset caches must exist or be generated at the document run time. If caching for one of the datasets is disabled or fails for any reason, the document cache for that document will not be generated.

Unlike report caches, which are created only as binary files, document caches can exist in the following formats: PDF, Excel, XML/Flash, and HTML. The document caching options can be edited through the Project Configuration Editor

Document Caching Best Practices

In terms of performance, the most important considerations for document caching are listed below:

• Unless there is a low number of relatively simple documents in a project, it is not recommended to enable project-level document caching.
• Allocate sufficient memory for document caches to avoid file swapping, which negatively affects performance. To determine how much memory might be needed, you must consider the cache format that will be created. XML caches consume more memory than report binary caches. Depending on the operating system, the memory consumption can vary from two to four times the size of the file. For example, in an Intelligence Server running on Oracle Solaris, a 10 KB file cache will use 40 KB of RAM. Binary, PDF, and Excel caches usually use the same amount of memory as their file sizes
• Avoid generating document caches on a per-user basis.
• Schedule the documents to run during the batch window. By pre-caching these documents, the wait time for the first user accessing these documents is completely eliminated.
• Avoid enabling the Automatic option to send documents to History List. When you send the document to a History List, a cached document instance is stored directly in the user's History List. This cache will not be reused during regular execution of the document. Therefore, if you send the documents automatically to History List, the execution of these documents will not create caches that can be reused across users.