The Varying Ways of Caching with PHP

What is Caching and Why You Need it

A cache is a temporary storage area used to rapidly access frequently accessed data. Caching minimizes the retrieval queries made to a database, reduces the number of requests made to external services, deducts from the time spent on computing data, and reduces the file-system access. In other words, it saves time and effort for instead of taking the time to go all the way back, and then the effort of retrieving the data, it simply retrieves it from this temporary storage area quickly.

What and Where to Cache

Cache the things that you either don’t want to fetch every time your code runs, or the things that won’t change very often. You can find these two pieces of data by monitoring queries, page loads, and Web Analytics. The dynamic data should not be cached because the data fetched may not be up-to-date as preferred.
Caching in certain ‘places’ assures you quicker access. For instance, caching on a local database is quicker than on a remote one; a local disk faster than a database; and RAM faster than a disk. Thus, the RAM is the quickest of all.

The Different Caching Approaches

• Full page caching
• Granular page caching
• Content pre-generation
• Opcode caching
• SQL query searching
• Browser caching
• Object/variable caching

Get Started with Caching with PHP

Ever since websites became dynamic (changing content), there has been a delay in their content loading to their end-users. Caching with PHP eliminates this problem as “cached files are 35% faster.” Contact out experienced team for more information regarding caching at www.bytehouse.co.uk/contact/