Question

I have a website that basically only displays things without any forms and post-gets.
This website is PHP based and hosted on shared hosting. It rarely changes.
I would like to enable caching for this website.
Its shared hosting so i need a solution that:

• does not use Memcached
• dont need to move my website to VPS
• dont use APC or other things

So basically what i would like to acomplish is cache every subsite to HTML and tell PHP to get for 5 minutes the HTML cached version of current subsite and display it to user. And after 5 minutes to refresh the cache.

I’ve been looking for some while on the internets and there are some tutorials and frameworks that support this kind of kinky cache.

But what i need is just one good library that is extremely easy to use.

I imagine it to work in this way:

<?

if (current_site_cache_is_valid())
{
   display_cached_version();
   die;
}

..mywebsite rendering code

?>

So simple as it sounds but i hope some good fellow developer did library of this kind before. So do you know such ready to use, not very time consuming to implement solution?

Answer 1

This is how I normally do this, however I don’t know your URL design nor your directory / file layout.

I do this with .htaccess and a mod_rewrite^­Docs.

The webserver checks if a cached HTML file exists, and if yes, it’s delivered. You can also check it’s age.

If it’s too old or if it does not exists your PHP script(s?) is started. At the beginning of your script you start the output buffer^­Docs. At the end of your script, you obtain the output buffer and you place the content into the cache file and then you output it.

The benefit of this solution is, that apache will deliver static files in case they exist and there is no need to invoke a PHP process. If you do it all within PHP itself, you won’t have that benefit.

I would even go a step further and run a cron-job that removes older cache-files instead of doing a time-check inside the .htaccess. That done, you can make the rewrite less complex to prefer a .php.cached file instead of the .php file.