Commerce Search allows you to cache entire user queries and their responses. This can improve performance by removing load from the Search engines, and is useful when many users are doing browse-type searches (such as faceted navigation) that result in repeated identical queries. The cache is based on the Ehcache open source library; for information, see http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/.
The cache stores the environment name, the query XML, and the response XML. By default, the cache stores the query in memory, along with the most recently used response values, while older responses are stored on disk.
Any ATG instance running the DAF.Search.Routing module can cache Search data; caches are created as needed, with one cache per Search environment. The default configuration maintains cache contents on disk during ATG server restarts.
Search caching is enabled by default. To disable caching, set the cacheService property of the RoutingSearchService component to null. If you disable caching, Search does not clear out any existing cached items, but it does not retrieve them or cache new items. You can also set the cacheable property of an individual SearchRequest object to false.
Cache contents are cleared when the first query is received for a newly deployed index.
