In 2012 we announced a new caching feature that allowed our client’s websites to benefit from static, dynamic, and Memcached. Since then, we have heavily enhanced the technology and fine-tuned its behaviour, and we now believe it to be the most powerful speed tool we have created for our clients.
Currently, the most massively used part of our caching tool is the Static cache (NGINX direct delivery), as it is switched on by default on all our client websites. However, today we take a major step that will result in much more massive adoption of the other two caching layers and will significantly increase the speed of the sites we have designed and host. We now make Dynamic Cache and Memcached available at no additional cost to our clients. Additionally, the dynamic cache will be activated on our clients sites by default.
50-500% Faster Page Loading
To briefly recap, dynamic caching is a technology that caches the HTML output of your PHP code. The PHP language is used so that the content of that same HTML is changed dynamically and upon a set of conditions predefined by the web creator. When using the cache, the next time a page is requested, the pure HTML will be displayed from the Cache, which is in the server’s RAM, instead of wasting CPU and I/O resources to read the PHP file from the disk. Thanks to that mechanism, the web page loads significantly faster. And by “faster”, we mean like 50-500% faster based on our internal statistics for sites that have it turned on. The bigger the impact we see on heavier sites – those with more products and queries. Once you enable the cache, the pages start loading as fast as your Internet allows it, literally, since the page response is returned instantaneously from the server’s memory.
What Is Memcached?
Memcached is probably the most popular memory caching system used by thousands of database-driven sites, which speeds up these websites by caching results from database queries in the server’s RAM. Thus, if the result of the same query is needed again, it will be instantaneously taken from the RAM rather than generated again from the Database, which is usually a slower process and requires more computing power.
