Last night I was honored to give a presentation to the Capital Area CFUG. My presentation was a preview of my MAX topic, "Best Practices of the Modern CF Developer." During the presentation the topic of Trusted Cache came up and I was truly surprised to hear that next to no one was using this in production.
While certainly not a silver bullet for performance issues, turning on the Trusted Cache (see screen shot below) can sometimes dramatically increase the performance of your site in the one second it takes for you to check a box. That's a huge win for little to no work on your part.
Seriously - go to your production site, hit that box, and tell me if you don't see your site running significantly faster afterwards. There is no XML involved. No Server restart. Just a checkbox.
Now - there is one small drawback. After you've done this, ColdFusion will no longer look at your CFML pages for changes. In order to tell ColdFusion to check a file again, you either have to a) hit the button below:
or b) make use of CacheClearer, a ColdFusion Admin extension that let's you specifically request a file or folder to be cleared.
So... why aren't more of you using this?