title: Any negative side effects to disabling caching in a Liferay production environment?
body: <p>Our production Liferay instance absolutely <em>refuses</em> to deploy my latest theme. Something is preventing it from displaying my latest CSS changes. Unfortunately, there are NO log errors and no Firebug Console errors, so it's been a real headache to diagnose. I just get a really ugly plain page with links and no styles applied.
  I have tried everything I can think of to fix this.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Undeploy/redeploy theme</li>
  <li>restart the Glassfish container</li>
  <li>use Liferay Server Administration page to "Clear content cached across this JVM", "Clear database cache", "Verify Database plugins", etc.</li>
  <li>undeploy, restart, redeploy</li>
  <li>undeploy, delete leftover files/folders pertaining to the theme in 'applications' folder, restart container, redeploy</li>
  <li>clear my browser cache</li>
  <li>try a different browser</li>
  <li>many more combinations of the above. You get the idea.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Last night I reached the boiling point because my theme deployed and displayed in our test environments without issue, but didn't work in production. The only thing that was different is that I wasn't using</p>
  
  <pre><code>include-and-override=portal-developer.properties
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in my portal-ext.properties file.
  I took a gamble and added this line to my production portal-ext.properties and restarted the production server. My theme now displays without a problem.</p>
  
  <p>The file portal-developer.properties only appears to contain the following properties:</p>
  
  <pre><code>theme.css.fast.load=false
  theme.images.fast.load=false
  
  javascript.fast.load=true
  javascript.log.enabled=false
  
  layout.template.cache.enabled=false
  
  browser.launcher.url=
  
  combo.check.timestamp=true
  
  freemarker.engine.cache.storage=soft:1
  freemarker.engine.modification.check.interval=0
  
  openoffice.cache.enabled=false
  
  velocity.engine.resource.manager.cache.enabled=false
  
  com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.cache.CacheFilter=false
  com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.etag.ETagFilter=false
  com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.header.HeaderFilter=false
  com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.themepreview.ThemePreviewFilter=true
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So, finally, my question is, am I merely trading a slight performance boost for a massively easier deployment experience?</p>
  
  <p>Or are there more serious concerns to loading this file in a production environment?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for the input!</p>
  
  <p>Ben</p>