Question

Which is better on a shared host?

Do you think it’s a good idea to cache database query results to disk?

Answer 1

It’s a very bad idea unless the queries are super-expensive (bad database layout?) and return a huge resultset.

• If the query is expensive but the resultset is small: Store it in memory, e.g. in memcached.
• If the query is cheap: Why cache it at all? But if you want to do it, memory is the way to go.

Databases usually keep lots of things in memory since disk access is very slow compared to memory access. So using the disk to cache small things usually doesn’t increase the performance.