The cache automatically invalidates it's self as soon as the ini file has a new modification timestamp.

What about when an override is created?

overrides are also ini files, the caching depends on the modification time of the ini file and will automatically create a new cache based on it.

I have tested this item 🔴 unsuccessfully on 4a7a88c

Applied the PR and no language values are loaded - only constants

Enabled language debug
Warning
: foreach() argument must be of type array|object, string given in
D:\repos\j6\plugins\system\debug\src\DataCollector\LanguageErrorsCollector.php
on line
132

funny, because actually the error collector function is broken, can you please.

can you please test 2 things (because I can't replicate it).

first move this line out of the try block, so the exception is not cached and you can see it.

second add [] around the text string

$this->errorfiles[$fileName] = ['PHP parser errors :' . $e->getMessage()];

then your error message shouldn't be warning anymore

third be sure to use the latest version from the "Preserve directory structure" or later commit, since I fixed the that frontend languages are used in backend and vis-a-vis.

first move this line out of the try block, so the exception is not cached and you can see it.

Joomla\Filesystem\Folder::create: Could not create directory. Path: [ROOT]\administrator\cache\language\D:

Look at the paths

I have no windows to test, but hope my change fixed it.

That change worked.

tested that overrides still work
tested site and admin
tested plugin that has language files in the plugin and not the main languages folder eg plg_sampledate_testing

Not tested any performance changes

I have tested this item ✅ successfully on 3acc14c

Reading and parsing a json file is faster.

like json_decode(file_get_contents('administrator/cache/language/administrator-language-en-GB-lib_joomla.ini.1743321429.json'),true);

about 30% on my stystem

Reading and parsing a json file is faster.

like json_decode(file_get_contents('administrator/cache/language/administrator-language-en-GB-lib_joomla.ini.1743321429.json'),true);

about 30% on my stystem

can you please show me you measurements, because my test says it's about 8-10 times slower using json for empty frontpage and using a 1mb ini files it's 80-100 times slower.

Hi,

I found the difference: php is a lot faster with opcache enabled. Without opache json.

So the caching strategy should depend on the opcache setting to makeit fancy?

tested on 52 language files on a (almost) clean j6 site.

opache on:

J: 2528880
A: 150734
J: 2629746
A: 141746
J: 2793574
A: 159460
J: 2343749
A: 160488
J: 2136911
A: 112294
J: 2428274
A: 131338
J: 2236474
A: 122881
J: 2356152
A: 136126
J: 2465985
A: 122388

opache off:

J: 3127872
A: 7223167
J: 3041450
A: 6905625
J: 3241212
A: 7150972
J: 3058796
A: 7086077
J: 3219969
A: 7078478
J: 3025679
A: 6968267
J: 3046686
A: 7132398
J: 3202466
A: 6967631
J: 2978589
A: 7161319

KISS, if you don't use opcache you don't care about performance so we shouldn't blow up our codebase for nothing.

I have tested this item ✅ successfully on 3acc14c

I have successfully tested this on 2 sites: non multi-lingual and 1 multi-lingual.

I can honestly say I saw consistently faster speeds however the speed improvement varied from quite a bit from 10% - 26% - I did the battery of test 5 times to get a sense but the large difference I assume comes from 1. the fact that caching is complex and 2. I have fast hosting so the speed difference would be small. Either way I trust you guys! :)

RTC

Just curious, why did you not use the Joomla cache API?

because it's too slow, the caching api would save the content to a file or database or apcu or whatever, which means it needs to load it (over tcp as worse case) and then decode the string and transform it into an array.

when doing it directly it uses the opcache in memory and in binary/compiled format. But for this to work you need a file on the filesystem.

There is no faster format then opcache, normally I would say yes use the caching api from joomla but since it's a very specific case (it's saved in the "wrong" format ini) I have chosen this way.

Above you see the variant with json which is slower, I would expect similar results for the joomla caching layer.

Thank you @HLeithner for the work on this and @brianteeman for testing and helping with the solution and thanks to the other testers who got involved.