Typically, you will use external caching to increase the memory that is available to your Oracle ATG Web Commerce application. Consider using external caching for a repository if it meets the following criteria.
There is more data in the repository than can easily be held in your application server’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM) memory. This may occur when there are hundreds of thousands of repository items and will typically occur when there are millions of items in the repository. These numbers are approximate and will vary depending on your application and server resources.
Your application accesses the data in the repository in a way that requires most of that data to be cached at the same time.
For example, the ProductCatalog repository may benefit from external caching. Catalogs typically have a large number of repository items and having them all cached in memory speeds page loading time.
