We were looking at some speed issues we had on our site with some pages and I noticed that were weren't using matrix cache / it is turned off on the following type codes
CCS files are delivered via apache (__data) and we have had problems with the captcha images in forms when they were cached in the past but I can't really see any benefit in not caching news items and standard pages and I am curious if other people are using the type code caching and what settings they are using.
We were looking at some speed issues we had on our site with some pages and I noticed that were weren't using matrix cache / it is turned off on the following type codes
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By speed issues do you mean how quickly pages are delivered/rendered?
If you have caching off you are going to have big problems because every request will require those pages to be rebuilt by matrix. You'll find many people having cache times of an hour up to 24 hours in some cases to avoid this.
There are triggers you can use to rebuild these pages when they change, but you have to set the cache values carefully for this to work correctly. Also, if you have lots of nested content (asset listings and so on) this can have an impct on build times for pages if they are not cached.
What sort of load is the site under (requests pere second) and what load are you seeing on the sever?
We cache everything, although some assets used to be for only 60 seconds (in our news section which needed faster updates). The home page was also set to about 2 minutes because it had news on it. For captcha you could dynamically insert that with JavaScript if caching was an issue.