Macrobyte Resources have added a number of macro caching features in the last 48 hours, including caching the insertQuery macro. This is especially useful to me since I use queries on data fields to build dynamic category pages.
This works great, but as the number of articles found grew larger, the amount of time the insertquery macro took grew longer.
Caching the macro results dramatically improved performance. My Miscellaneous page used to take 9 to 10 seconds to display because it has so many articles. Caching it reduces the display time to about 2.5 seconds — quite an improvement.
Macrobyte has wisely included an option to control how long the macro is cached, and I’m setting it at 12 hours since I don’t update all that often, and I can live with a 12-hour dated category page that loads four times faster than normal.