Caching level, is there any problem having it dissabled?

[Gluz]

Hi, I run 3 forums and recently I'm helping some user to check his forum to get some mods to work.

All of my 3 forums are in different Hosts, there are 1and1, GoDaddy and HostPapa, and only the one in HostPapa give me problems with the Caching, so I have to turn it off (No Caching) because after login in the value ['is_guest'] keep showing as true with Level 1 Caching (and then some menus/forum links don't show as they would), and after change that value to No Caching the forum works well, a little slower because the cheap server specs but no problems with Caching. But in the other forums I don't have that problem, they work well in Level 1 Caching.

And after some inspects on the forum of the user I'm helping out, it have some trouble with that so I change that to No Caching too.


But I really don't know if it's a good idea/practice to turn that to No Caching, is there any drawback of having that setting on No Caching?

Also that forum recently have a White Screen (of Death) and after looking trough the logs and no one point to anything I deleted the cache folder content and it works again, so maybe I'm missing something important here, as I searched trough this forum and can't have a clear answer to why deleting the cache folder content get the forum work again?, what is really happening in the forum that cause that error?

[Kindred]

Given that no one else seems to have ever had that issue with the  wsod regarding the coach directory, I have to assume that your host is doing something extremely screwy, and that is causing your issues.

We have no idea what is causing the issue, since no one else has ever reported it....

[JBlaze]

This sounds like some sort of weird configuration on the server which is screwing up file permissions/ownership. SMF's file-based caching is relatively simple, and should have no reason to function like that unless there's issues with file permissions/ownership.

[Gluz]

From the user forum that is the one with the white screen, I also think that the host is doing something weird, as the PHP mail is not working anymore and the twitter api is blocked (just the api subdomain, not the twitter base domain), but because it's a free server we have not much hopes on that to get solved soon.

My main question is, it's ok to have that setting in No Caching? is not bad to the forum performance? or I have to talk with the host to solve the problems when in Level 1 Caching.

[JBlaze]

My main question is, it's ok to have that setting in No Caching? is not bad to the forum performance? or I have to talk with the host to solve the problems when in Level 2 Caching.

It depends on how busy the forum is. If you're constantly getting long load times or server timeouts, then yes it's time to seriously consider some third party caching. If not, then you'll be OK.