Automatically Cache

This guide addresses how to use the panel.cache decorator to memoize (i.e. cache the output of) functions automatically.

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The pn.cache decorator provides an easy way to cache the outputs of a function depending on its inputs (i.e. memoization). If you’ve ever used the Python @lru_cache decorator you will be familiar with this concept. However the pn.cache functions support additional cache policys apart from LRU (least-recently used), including LFU (least-frequently-used) and ‘FIFO’ (first-in-first-out). This means that if the specified number of max_items is reached Panel will automatically evict items from the cache based on this policy. Additionally items can be deleted from the cache based on a ttl (time-to-live) value given in seconds.

Caching in memory

The pn.cache decorator can easily be combined with the different Panel APIs including pn.bind and pn.depends providing a powerful way to speed up your applications.

@pn.cache(max_items=10, policy='LRU')
def load_data(path):
    return ... # Load some data

Once you have decorated your function with pn.cache any call to load_data will be cached in memory until max_items value is reached (i.e. you have loaded 10 different path values). At that point the policy will determine which item is evicted.

The pn.cache decorator can easily be combined with pn.bind to speed up rendering of your reactive components:

import pandas as pd
import panel as pn

pn.extension('tabulator')

select = pn.widgets.Select(options={
    'Penguins': 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mwaskom/seaborn-data/master/penguins.csv',
    'Diamonds': 'https://raw.githucbusercontent.com/mwaskom/seaborn-data/master/diamonds.csv',
    'Titanic': 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mwaskom/seaborn-data/master/titanic.csv',
    'MPG': 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mwaskom/seaborn-data/mastser/mpg.csv'
})

@pn.cache
def fetch_data(url):
    return pd.read_csv(url)

pn.Column(select, pn.bind(pn.widgets.Tabulator, pn.bind(fetch_data, select), page_size=10))

Disk caching

If you have diskcache installed you can also cache the results to disk by setting to_disk=True. The diskcache library will then cache the value to the supplied cache_path (defaulting to ./cache). Making use of disk caching allows you to cache items even if the server is restarted.

Clearing the cache

Once a function has been decorated with pn.cache you can easily clear the cache by calling .clear() on that function, e.g. in the example above you could call load_data.clear(). If you want to clear all caches you may also call pn.state.clear_caches().

Per-session caching

By default any functions decorated or wrapped with pn.cache will use a global cache that will be reused across multiple sessions, i.e. multiple users visiting your app will all share the same cache. If instead you want a session-local cache, that only reuses cached outputs for the duration of each visit to your application, you can set pn.cache(..., per_session=True).

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