Upon each invocation of the PHP application, Smarty tests to see if the
current template has changed (different time stamp) since the last time
it was compiled. If it has changed, it recompiles that template. If the
template has not been compiled, 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
maximal 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. See
$force_compile and clear_compiled_tpl()
.