Symfony 2 and Twig cache — are they the same?

Question

My question is are the Symfony 2 cache mechanism and Twig cache mechanism the same?

Lets say I decide to use Twig in my MVC framework, would I have the same cache mechanism Symfony 2 uses? I know both Symfony2 and Twig are created by Fabien. But I dont know is Symfony 2 using only Twig cache or is there something more?

So I hope you understand the question. Does Symfony 2 uses Twig for cache? And if not, what are the differences between Symfony 2 and Twig caching?

Answer 1

unsure of the full answer, but symfony and twig must use separate caching mechanisms as you are not forced to use twig in symfony and yet cache still works. for more info check http://symfony.com/doc/current/ and dig into the code.

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Edit: To expand on my non-answer above. Twig cache is really a compilation cache. Your templates are saved as php files. To quote F. Potencier "[...] Twig caches the compiled templates to avoid the parsing phase for sub-sequent requests. [...]" ( source )

While Symfony cache is (as has already been mentioned) a HTTP cache and is extensively explained in Symfony Docs cache section

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Symfony 2 uses HTTP cache for caching purposes. And Twig cache is joust caching of Twig templates, so they don't have to recompile on every request. So Twig caching only ensures templates are compiled once on first request.

And Symfony 2 HTTP cache is another beast :) It provides abstraction around HTTP Cache mechanism and so you can cache using HTTP Cache headers etc...

So the short answer is NO! They are not the same!

Answer 3

No, they are not the same. Symfony caches a lot of stuff like routes, translations, the container, etc; Twig just caches templates by compiling them down to PHP classes. Of course, Twig's caching system works in a Symfony app as well.