Dada Mail's Screen Cache is a simple way to speed up certain parts of Dada Mail.
When enabled, Dada Mail will cache the output to many of the often-visted screens, including the default screen, the list screen and archive screens, archive result screens, as well as javascript files, small parts (widgets) of other templates and even images used by Dada Mail.
Caching is especially useful for Dada Mail installations that have many lists, a lot of archives on busy websites. Caching helps in limiting how much the backend database is hit - the less the database is queried, the less load there is on your hosting account. Everybody wins!
Users who are logged in via their Dada Mail Profile will still see custom screens on certain assets of Dada Mail, since these screens will be different for each user.
Dada Mail Screen Caches should be 100% comptable with unicode/UTF-8.
Cached Screens are located in a directory called, _screen_cache, inside wherever
your Dada Mail .tmp directory ((.dada_files/.tmp/_screen_cache)) is set up.
Removing this directory is safe to do. If enabled, the cache will be re-created.
Usually, there's nothing you'll need to do, to keep your cache working just fine. When you make any changes to any Mailing List's settings or archives, the cache will be automatically flushed of any files, to be re-created again.
If you are working on a new list-wide or installation-wide design for Dada Mail, it could be helpful to temporarily disable Screen Caching, until you're all set with your design.
Disabling the Screen Cache is as easy as setting the Dada Mail config variable, $SCREEN_CACHE to something
other than, 1. You can re-enable it at anytime by setting the $SCREEN_CACHE variable to, 1.
There's also a plugin available to view and selectively remove cached screens: