How to test django caching?

Is there a way to be sure that a page is coming from cache on a production server and on the development server as well?

The solution shouldn't involve caching middleware because not every project uses them. Though the solution itself might be a middleware.

Just checking if the data is stale is not a very safe testing method IMO.

From stackoverflow

• Mock the view, hit the page, and see if the mock was called. if it was not, the cache was used instead.

• The reason you use caches is to improve performance. Test the performance by running a load test against your server. If the server's performance matches your needs, then you are all set!

• We do a lot of component caching and not all of them are updated at the same time. So we set host and timestamp values in a universally included context processor. At the top of each template fragment we stick in:

  <!-- component_name {{host}} {{timestamp}} -->
  

  The component_name just makes it easy to do a View Source and search for that string.

  All of our views that are object-detail pages define a context variable "page_object" and we have this at the top of the base.html template master:

  <!-- {{page_object.class_id}} @ {{timestamp}} -->
  

  class_id() is a method from a super class used by all of our primary content classes. It is just:

  def class_id(self):
      "%s.%s.%s" % (self.__class__._meta.app_label,
                      self.__class__.__name__, self.id)
  

  If you load a page and any of the timestamps are more than few seconds old, it's a pretty good bet that the component was cached.

  muhuk : Elegant solution. Can be automated as well. Thanks.

  Matthew : Just for convenience sake, do you have the context processors you mentioned somewhere on djangosnippets.org or other site?

  Peter Rowell : Adding a context processor is easy! 1. Create a file, e.g. my_context.py. 2. Create a function that takes a request object, e.g. my_context(request). 3. Return a dict of fun stuff available to all templates. 4. Add "my_context.my_context" to TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS in settings.py. 5. Profit!