Is it possible to have more information about how PhpExpress's cache works?

I understand the work done by the encoder: it compiles the files to bytecode and passes them to the PHP interpreter like that, so it's faster. But I'm not sure I fully understand what the cache feature does! What is the underlying principle?

By the way, congratulations NuSphere team for this new product!

in a nut shell caching means that once PHP script is compiled into bytecodes, the result is stored in the cache. The next time this script is executed, PhpExpress will be smart enough to skip the compilation and load what's cached. If you call phpexpress() from your PHP script you will be presented with the UI displaying the state of the cache.
Hope it helps.

Yes, but if I encode the files locally, before uploading them online (where phpexpress is installed), what will the cache do? There is then only one version of each file online: the already compiled one, right? So there is no need to cache another version... Or am I missing something?

What you see in encoded files is a bytestream that requres some pre-processing before it becomes suitable for running by php. Cache will eliminate this phase. But certainly you can turn cache off. It works independently.

Thanks for the explanation!