With the advent of Ajax and Web 2.0, the request count per user has increased dramatically, over the last year. Adding more machines to cater to this need is neither practical nor does it improve latency. It is this challenge to provide an instant, yet rich user experience, within the limits of available hardware, that this talk seeks to address.

There are a variety of proven techniques which will improve and super-charge your PHP application, with the judicious use of caches at various levels.

At the code level, you have APC. APC (Alternative Php Cache) is a PHP extension which can dramatically improve the performance of your PHP scripts by caching intermediate code generated by the PHP engine, completely transparently to your application.

At the data level, depending on size, frequency of access/updation, and cost of regeneration, caching can be done on-disk, in-memory or in a database.

This presentation will cover a quick overview of how these caches work and how they interact with your PHP code, which will help your code perform better, for just a few minor tweaks.