Trap for young players, not that I’m such a young player myself.
The default setting for user_ini.cache_ttl is 300 seconds, which means that it refreshes every 5 minutes. If you are tweaking the settings in .user.ini, it could take up to 5 minutes before you see the results of your experimentation.
If you don’t have access to php.ini where you can change this setting, you will have to learn to be very patient.