What is Tile Caching?
When it comes to mapping, performance is key! Tile caching is a great way to help with map rendering speed. Instead of having to draw the map from scratch map images that has been previously rendered are stored and displayed upon request. Map Suite has many different tile caching options for your specific application needs.
Depending on your application caching can be done on the client & server side for web applications or on the file system for Desktop applications. The flexible APIs allows you to easily create multiple tile caches for different purposes. There are several caching strategies, such as prebuilding all of the tile cache ahead of time, only prebuilding the higher zoom levels, or just caching as tiles get built in real-time through the usage of the application or website. However, there are some trade-offs you should consider when developing your application:
Pros:
Faster Performance
Less Server/Computer Resources needed as tiles are rendered once instead of every time.
Allows for more scalability
Can work in an offline scenario.
Cons
Lose flexibility of being able to turn off and on a large number of different layers.
More difficult to change rendering of certain layers once a tile cache has been built.
Need to decide how long your cache will be valid for.
Want to see an application using tile caching? Check our online maps here! If you are interested in an evaluation or pre-generating the tiles download theTile Cache Generator sample.
