Caching Tiles

Caching is used to enhance performance and minimize redundant rendering of frequently rendered map tiles. To speed up map rendering in your Spectrum™ Technology Platform application, you can have requested map tiles cached to disk so that Spectrum™ Technology Platform does not have to repeatedly regenerate the same tiles on subsequent requests.

A built-in pluggable tile caching mechanism is provided with the Map Tiling Service. This allows you to pre-generate tiles, and use these tiles as a cache source for your application. You can also use the tile cache for holding on-the-fly rendered tiles for more efficient map navigation.

As an alternative to the service's built-in caching mechanism, you can use external caching software such as Apache, write your own caching mechanism, or cache tile in the middle tier using software such as Squid. In these cases, you must have the service's built-in caching mechanism turned off.

Note: HTTP cache control headers must be disabled in order for the Map Tiling Service to work properly (that is, use the HTTP headers of individual web services). See Disabling Default HTTP Cache Control Headers for instructions.

Tiles can be pre-generated using the Tile Generator utility. The utility can be accessed through the Spectrum Spatial Utilities tab in the Welcome page. For more information on the Tile Generator, see the Tile Generator documentation.