Rendering & caching: a journey through the layers

Have you seen and heard of Render API (with its render caching, lazy builders and render pipeline), Cache API (and its cache tags & contexts), Dynamic Page Cache, Page Cache and BigPipe? Have you cursed them, wondered about them, been confused by them?

I will show you three typical use cases:

1. An uncacheable block
2. A personalized block
3. A cacheable block that you can see if you have a certain permission and that should update whenever some entity is updated

… and for each, will take you on the journey through the various layers: from rendering to render caching, on to Dynamic Page Cache and eventually Page Cache … or BigPipe.

Coming out of this session, you should have a concrete understanding of how these various layers cooperate, how you as a Drupal developer can use them to your advantage, and how you can test that it's behaving correctly.

I'm a maintainer of Dynamic Page Cache and BigPipe, and an effective co-maintainer of Render API, Cache API and Page Cache.