Page Caching With PHP

[Joseph_Witchard]

I'm considering using PHP sessions for caching my pages for a set amount of time, and I wanted to know if I'll need to create a different session name for each page I want to cache, or if I can use the same session name and just include the appropriate code in each page via require()?

[planetsim]

Im not sure I am quite following what you want to do ? Are you saying you want to cache an entire page into a session ? If so it seems some what pointless. My reason being that what if a page is the same for each user why cache the same page potentially multiple times when it could be much better to cache once for all.

[cahva]

Im with planetsim. Theres no reason to use session as a cache because it saves the pages for every user in their own session file.

Use ready made cache systems like Cache Lite, Zend Cache or even Memcached.

They all are good ones but memcached is different from those options and it needs a daemon to be run and extension for PHP. It also uses memory so its different that way also when the other 2 are file based caches.

I personally like the Pear Cache_Lite as it is very light and easy to use(well the usage is pretty much the same for all of them).

[Joseph_Witchard]

What do you mean their own session file? Like, if I looked at my cookies in Firefox, if I had visited somedomain.com, there would be one for each page I visited at somedomain?

[Weedpacket]

No, there would be one session file for your visit (technically called a "session"). Someone else visiting would have separate session file for their session.

[Joseph_Witchard]

This may sound like a dumb question, but what would happen to my site if I didn't specify any instruction code for caching anywhere? No meta info, no http headers, no PHP, etc. Would it cache or not cache or only cache part of the time?

[dagon]

Joseph Witchard;10908006 wrote:

This may sound like a dumb question, but what would happen to my site if I didn't specify any instruction code for caching anywhere? No meta info, no http headers, no PHP, etc. Would it cache or not cache or only cache part of the time?

That's how 99% of sites are set up. Unless your having specific problems, there's nothing you need to do in terms of caching.

[Joseph_Witchard]

But what does it do? Does it cache them or not? I want to cache my pages to reduce load time, but I only want them to stay cached for a set amount of time in case I update the page. That's why I'm looking into sessions for caching options.

[dagon]

Joseph Witchard;10908054 wrote:

But what does it do?

if no caching is set up, then caching doesn't happen (at least on the web server)

[Joseph_Witchard]

So do the PHP session cache functions cache it on the server instead of the browser?

[dagon]

your confusing session caching with file caching

[Joseph_Witchard]

What's the difference?