Django: caching all but user auth in page

Question

I'm experimenting with various Django 1.3 caching approaches to use for our landing page. This page has results from several database queries as well as user authentication. By far the best-performing solution has been to use the @cache_page decorator to cache the whole view function response. The problem is that user auth also gets cached.

I can create a key in the cache for each user but this seems wasteful; caching the same landing page over and over with the only difference being the user's authentication. I also used template fragment caching and low-level caching for all but the authentication but the performance was nowhere near as good as the @cache_page decorator approach.

Is there a way to get the performance of @cache_page without lots of redundant user-based caching?

Answer 1

Check out this blog post: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-two-phased-rendering/

Basically the technique is to wrap your user-specific segments in a template tag that prevents the template engine from rendering them, then cache, and then re-render the cached output to fill out the user details.

Django 1.5 includes a tag called verbatim which can be used instead of the custom raw tag in the post; you'll still need the custom CachedTemplateMiddleware or equivalent though.