Upon each invocation of the PHP application, Smarty tests to see if the
current template has changed (different timestamp) since the last time
it was compiled. If it has changed, it recompiles that template. If the
template has yet not been compiled at all, it will compile regardless of this
setting. By default this variable is set to TRUE.
Once an application is
put into production (ie the templates won't be changing),
the compile check step is no longer needed. Be sure to set
$compile_check to FALSE for
maximum performance. Note that if you change this to FALSE and a
template file is changed, you will *not* see the change since the
template will not get recompiled.
If $caching
is enabled and $compile_check is enabled, then
the cache files will get regenerated if an involved template file or
config file was updated.
As of Smarty 3.1 $compile_check can be set to the value
Smarty::COMPILECHECK_CACHEMISS. This enables Smarty to
revalidate the compiled template, once a cache file is regenerated. So if there was
a cached template, but it's expired, Smarty will run a single compile_check before
regenerating the cache.
See $force_compile and
clearCompiledTemplate().