Question

I have a page with a post and multiple comments, by using PHP’s ob_start() I am able to cache it successfully.

Next to each comment I have a username and its number of current posts and reputation. Now I am keeping the cache of the page with the post all until someone adds a new comment, only then I update the cache file.

Now the problem is that a user’s post number and reputation will increase as he posts/comments on other topics, and its post number and reputation will not change on elder posts.

What would be the best practice to tackle this issue.

Answer 1

If you are by any means concerned with your site’s performance you should switch to APC as it provides both opcode caching as well as means for caching as a key/value store.

You can store entire blocks of content, arrays, objects, you name it:

// you must supply:
// 1. a key you will later use to retrieve your content
// 2. the data you wish to cache
// 3. how long the cache should remain valid 
apc_store($key, $data, $ttl);

As far as retrieval goes, you simply make a call like:

$data = apc_fetch($key);