I’m primarily wondering what the speed difference is in accessing the object cache of APC v. memcached (NOT op-code cache). The primary advantage of memcached is that it is distributed and not restricted to the local machine. However, since it is over the network, there’s is some sort of latency involved.
I was wondering whether the speed difference between accessing APC (on the machine) and memcached (on another server) is big enough to warrant having a staged caching scheme, where the program first tries APC, then memcached, and finally the database if all else fails.
Like most everything else: it depends.
If you have a lot of calculations and can store the results then caching will speed things up. If you’re just basically storing rows from the database then in memory caching will help but memcached may not add a huge amount of difference vs. a database (assuming the db queries are all simple). On the other hand if you’re doing complex queries, or a lot of programmatic work to create something, then caching makes much more sense.
To give you an example, I recently worked on a site that was written by a 3rd party contractor who did not do any performance work during design. It was slow as an ox because it had a lot of unoptimized includes and such. Adding APC basically improved the performance by 10x. Adding memached decreased load times by 10 – 20 ms.
If you’re far enough along then do some performance testing (look up xdebug, or another tool) and see where your bottlenecks are, then plan accordingly.