In Ruby on Rails, caching is a crucial technique to improve application performance by reducing the need to repeatedly generate content or query the database. Here are the differences between the various types of caching available in Rails:
Page Caching
Page Caching is a mechanism that allows the entire content of a page to be cached and served directly by the web server (e.g., Apache or NGINX) without going through the Rails stack. This makes it extremely fast. However, it is not suitable for pages that require authentication or other dynamic content. Page Caching has been removed from Rails 4, but it can still be used by adding the actionpack-page_caching gem[2][3].
Action Caching
Action Caching is similar to Page Caching but allows for the execution of before filters, such as authentication, before serving the cached content. This means that the request still goes through the Rails stack, allowing for actions like user authentication to be performed before the cached content is served. Like Page Caching, Action Caching has also been removed from Rails 4 and requires the actionpack-action_caching gem to be used[1][2][3].
Fragment Caching
Fragment Caching is used for caching individual parts or fragments of a view rather than the entire page. This is particularly useful for dynamic web applications where different parts of a page have different caching requirements. For example, you might cache a list of articles separately from the rest of the page. Fragment Caching can significantly reduce the number of database q...
