This tells Smarty whether or not to cache the output of the templates. By default this is set to 0, or disabled. If your templates generate redundant content, it is advisable to turn on $caching. This will result in significant performance gains. You can also have multiple caches for the same template. A value of 1 or 2 enables caching. 1 tells Smarty to use the current $cache_lifetime variable to determine if the cache has expired. A value of 2 tells Smarty to use the $cache_lifetime value at the time the cache was generated. This way you can set the $cache_lifetime just before fetching the template to have granular control over when that particular cache expires. See also is_cached(). If $compile_check is enabled, the cached content will be regenerated if any of the templates or config files that are part of this cache are changed. If $force_compile is enabled, the cached content will always be regenerated. See also $cache_dir, $cache_lifetime, $cache_handler_func, $cache_modified_check and Caching section.