A general caching decorator for Python
written on Monday, May 13, 2013
I was writing a new blog engine today that uses plain text markdown files for the posts. They need to be converted into html before they can be served to the browser. Generating each response was quite computationally intensive. But at the same time I didn't want to statically generate the html. It is just irritating to have to go through a compile step everytime you fix a typo or make a minor change to a sentence.
So naturally I thought of using a decorator to cache or memoize the posts function. There are plenty of examples that can handle a function with positional arguments. But none that I found that could cache a function that took args as well as keyword arguments. Mainly because dictionaries are not hashable types. That makes them a bit trickier to use as keys. Below is what I ended up using:
def cache_me(cache):
def wrapper(func):
if NOT_CACHING:
return func
def inner(*args, **kwargs):
hashed_kwargs = hash(frozenset(kwargs.items()))
try:
return cache[(args, hashed_kwargs)]
except KeyError:
cache[(args, hashed_kwargs)] = func(*args, **kwargs)
return cache[(args, hashed_kwargs)]
return inner
return wrapper
And here shown being actually used:
@cache_me(cache={})
post(post_name):
return Post(post_name).render()
When I am developing I set the global NOT_CACHING to True and then I can get instant feedback on any changes. With caching turned on the site could now handle a request every 5ms. Which compares pretty well to 35ms with it off. It is not perfect. In some cases it will generate a false cache hit because it is ignoring the keys and only cares about the values of the dictionary.