Introduction to Navigation Caching


One of the nice feature of improving performance of the External Facing Portal is “Navigation Caching”. We can cache the navigation hierarchy and nodes of the user so that the same node loaded by other users will be not be reloaded from the server, this will significantly improve the performance, especially for most of the users that using the same workset or navigation hierarchy.


Another word, Navigation Cache is to improve performance on the server-side. By saving the Navigation Nodes in memory, the number of calls to the PCD or any other backend systems are reduced.When the user launch the framework page, the portal can take the navigation hierarchy from the cache instead of creating it from scratch.The cache is implemented in a First in - First out manner (FIFO).

Navigation caching works in the background, and there's not much you have to do -- except turn it on!!

You can configure the portal navigation caching by using SAP J2EE Visual Administrator tool. After you have connected to VA tool, go to Clusterà Services à com.sap.portal.prt.sapj2ee, then look for the following properties:
  • Whether navigation caching is turned on (portal.navigation.cache.enable)
  • The maximum size of the navigation cache (portal.navigation.cache.lifetime)
  • For how long each object is valid (portal.navigation.cache.maxsize)