The dispatcher behaviour as described before has one major drawback which may have an implication on the design of your content structure.

Invalidation is performed on a whole directory and all its subtrees!

So if you invalidate a file A in a directory, the file B in the same directory is also invalidated. Also file C in the subdirectory D is invalidated. All these invalidated files need to be refetched from your CQ instance again, until the caching will work again. This happens, although you invalidated only file A. Files B and C aren’t changed at all, but they are refechted! So a single invalidation can create a lot of load on your CQ instance(s).

But this may be a side-effect, which you want to have. Because when the change of handle A may also affect handle B and C (maybe your changed the title of handle A which is required by handle B and C to render a correct navigation). This is the easiest way to invalidate all dependent handles when you change a single one.

So the point is to find a balance between permanently flushing your whole cache when you activate a single handle and taking care of your dependencies and get files marked invalid when an update should happen.

And here comes the already mentioned parameter \statfileslevel. If we assume that you have a well-designed content structure you set this parameter as high as possible to minimize the number of files which are invalidated if a single file is invalidated. On the other hand you should set it to a level so that all files are invalidated which depend on the invalidated file.

Knowing this you should arrange your content as follows:

• Group your content and use hierarchies. This allows you increase your statfileslevel.
• Minimize the number of dependencies between your handles so you can keep the statfileslevel high. Keep dependent handles in the same directory and try to avoid dependencies to handles in your parent directory (or even higher), so you don’t need to decrease the statfileslevel.

Note: The parameter \statfileslevel has a global scope.