Reply To: Improve ACF performance – implement a simple caching (an example provided)

• Elliot

• April 27, 2016 at 10:05 am

Hi guys

This is a great topic.

Currently, ACF will cache any value loaded from the DB, but after loading, the $value is sent to another function that formats it based on the field type.

When dealing with the repeater / gallery field, this results in a lot of extra logic / DB calls.

I have caching setup for the loading of values, but not for the formatting of values.
I wonder if we adding caching to the format function, this will fix the issue.

The following assumes you are using ACF PRO (or ACF v5 in the future):

Open the file api/api-value.php and finc the acf_get_value function. Below this function is the acf_format_value function. Note that the format function contains no caching, but the load function does.

Try changing the format function to this:

/*
*  acf_format_value
*
*  This function will format the value for front end use
*
*  @type	function
*  @date	3/07/2014
*  @since	5.0.0
*
*  @param	$value (mixed)
*  @param	$post_id (mixed)
*  @param	$field (array)
*  @return	$value
*/

function acf_format_value( $value, $post_id, $field ) {
	
	// try cache
	$found = false;
	$cache = wp_cache_get( "format_value/post_id={$post_id}/name={$field['name']}", 'acf', false, $found );
	if( $found ) return $cache;
	
	
	// apply filters
	$value = apply_filters( "acf/format_value", $value, $post_id, $field );
	$value = apply_filters( "acf/format_value/type={$field['type']}", $value, $post_id, $field );
	$value = apply_filters( "acf/format_value/name={$field['name']}", $value, $post_id, $field );
	$value = apply_filters( "acf/format_value/key={$field['key']}", $value, $post_id, $field );
	
	
	// update cache
	wp_cache_set( "format_value/post_id={$post_id}/name={$field['name']}", $value, 'acf' );
	
	
	// return
	return $value;
	
} 

Does it work? I’ll do some testing too, but would be great to hear back from you @wube