Question

I have a project that is a results database for several sport event series.
As you an imagine most the content remains more or less the same.
I would like to cache some of the content to save database queries.

The project is build using PHP and is using a custom MVC.
Where would you add the caching logic?

Answer 1

Use Memcached. Something like this, where you cache the results of the query, and try retrieving from cache before DB.

Edit: Added json_encoding the data… json_encode is slightly faster than PHP’s default serialization for arrays, and can be used by other applications accessing the data

Memcached by default uses FastLZ compression.

// The ID of the item you're looking for (from $_GET or whatever)
$id = 1;

// Create a memcached instance
$m = new Memcached();
$m->addServer('localhost', 11211);

// Try retrieving the event from memcached
$data = $m->get('event_' . $id);

if ($data) {
    // If you found data in memcached, decode it for use in code
    $data = json_decode($data);
} else {
    // If you didn't find the data in memcached, try retrieving from the DB
    $result = mysqli_query('SELECT * FROM events WHERE id = ' . $id);
    // If you found results in the DB...
    if ($data = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
        // Save them to memcached for future calls
        // Note: here, I'm using the optional param to expire it after 1 day
        $m->set('event_' . $id, json_encode($data), 86400);
    }
}
// Now you can use your data
var_dump($data);

Edited to add comments in code