Urgent - Caching on just on specific pages (htaccess or php)

wmac

Hello

One of my sites has become popular and some pages eat 1G per day.

Is it possible to cache specific pages only?

Because of login problems (people going into each other's accounts) I have turned off session ID's in url's and my login script does this:

 ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', 0); 
 session_cache_limiter('private');
 session_set_cookie_params(20000);
 session_start(); 
 session_register("curruserid");

Now I want to cache 2 specific pages (main.php and browse.php)

I will appereciate if someone can give some advice.

Regards,
Mac

drew010

if the pages are dynamic session pages you may not want to tell the users browser to cache them as they may not get the most updated data. also, the caching may be ignored since the client will have to revalidate the session cookie in order to verify the session every time.

rehfeld

yeah usually you dont want to cache a dynamic page. but im guessing in your situation those pages arent very dynamic.

2 places you can receive large gains on are :
1- making sure your images get sent with a sensible expires time.
2- turn on gzip output compression.

i would do some reading up on the subject, theres lots to be considered.
heres a decent article, but you should read a few.
http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/

also, if your not already using css, start. if you are, move all your css to external stylesheets, and make sure they get sent w/ the porper expires headers as well. same for javascript.

a bloated tag soup html layout vs clean efficient html, using external css files and output compression, can yield you some extreme bandwidth savings. its not uncommon to be able to reduce bandwidth consumption by over 90%