Strategies for Caching on the Web? [closed]

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What concerns, processes, and questions do you take into account when deciding when and how to cache. Is it always a no win situation?

This presupposes you are stuck with a code base that has been optimized.

Answer 1

What language are you using? With ASP you have some very easy caching with only adding some property tag over the method and the value is cached depending of the time.

If you want more control over the cache, you can use some popular system like MemCached and have a control with time or by event.

Answer 2

Where available, look out for whole object memory caching. In ASPNET, this is a built-in feature where you can just plant your business logic objects in the IIS Application and access them from there.

This means you can store everything you need to generate a page in memory (persisting writes to database) and generate a page without ANY database IO.

You still need to use the page-building logic to generate the page, but you save a lot of time in getting the data.

Other techniques involve localised output caching, where you capture the output before sending and save it to file. This is great for static sections (like navigation on certain pages, or text bodies) and include them out when they're requested. Most implementations purge cached objects like this when a write happens or after a certain period of time.

Then there's the least "accurate": whole page caching. It's the highest performer but it's pretty useless unless you have very simple pages.