The image caches can be turned off in settings by deselecting TimThumb. This will slow down page loads, but that is the only impact. HOWEVER, Apple’s API has a request limit, after which they will temporarily block you. This is why the caching of that request data [the ones that start with asl_####] happens by default and doesn’t have an option to be turned off in the plugin.
If you delete the cache files (or indeed the entire cache folder) everything will work just fine, but they will be regenerated as visitors come to the site, which is not what you are wanting.
That said:
If you really want to turn off the API caching, and you’re willing to deal with periodic outages if your site hits the request limit, you can go into asl.php at line 403 and replace this:
function asl_get_content($url) {
// add cache directory if not exists
$cacheDir = dirname(__FILE__).'/cache';
if($cacheDir){
if(! is_dir($cacheDir)){
@mkdir($cacheDir);
if(! is_dir($cacheDir)){
$this->error("Could not create the file cache directory.");
return false;
}
}
}
//vars
$mins = asl_setting('json_cache');
$cache = dirname(__FILE__).'/cache/asl_'.md5($url).'.txt';
$current_time = time(); $expire_time = $mins * 60; $file_time = @filemtime($cache);
//do we use the cache or the file?
if(file_exists($cache) && ($current_time - $expire_time < $file_time)) {
//echo 'returning from cached file';
return file_get_contents($cache);
}
else {
$content = asl_fopen_or_curl($url);
file_put_contents($cache, $content);
return file_get_contents($cache);
}
}
with the much simpler:
function asl_get_content($url) {
$content = asl_fopen_or_curl($url);
return file_get_contents($content);
}
If your site gets a lot of traffic and makes a lot of requests, you may see temporary issues where you won’t get app data.
