I know there are a few questions similar to this on the forum such as: Is the QGIS cache directory automatically created? and Can QGIS cache a PostGIS layer for faster rendering?

but I am still struggling to understand how the caching of shapefiles, geopackages, rasters and PostGIS works in QGIS.

Is the caching a temporary thing that isn't permanently stored in the user .qgis2 file path, and if so are there plans for this to be a thing in future releases?


Render caching just remembers how a layer was previously rendered. This speeds up overall rendering in cases where only one layer is changed but all others stay same. All unchanged layers don't have to be rendered again. QGIS can simply fetch the previously rendered image from memory. For this reason, there is also no difference between render caching for Shapefiles, GeoPackages, or any other kind of data source.

I'm not a developer but I'm pretty sure it's all just in memory and therefore temporary. Any attempt to store the cache permanently would soon flood the user's hard drives.

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