[TYPO3-english] The cost of caching

[Graham Knight]

Hi,

I manage a fairly small TYPO3 site (v4.5) for my cycling club. The hosting company recently contacted me and asked me to reduce the size of some database tables as, they claimed, the processing cost associated with these was having an impact on the performance of other sites. They say "At present, your site is amongst the highest users of CPU time on the server and the second highest user in terms of mySQL processors".

The tables they identified all had to do with caching. I cleared out most of these tables but pointed out to them that, in my experience, clearing the caches greatly increased the response time of the site. I had attributed to the INCREASED database accesses needed to construct pages from scratch.

They have now suggested that I turn off caching as the database engine already does its own, effective query caching.

Has anyone experience of something similar? Is the hosting company's suggestion likely to work? Is there some sort of compromise that will optimise caching performance?

Many thanks.

Graham