PHP Opcache is a good caching plugin for PHP but what if you wanted a quicker in code way of selectively caching MySQL results in memory. More information on the underlying memcached.

Official Description:

Description: A high-performance memory object caching system. Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

Memcached optimizes specific high-load serving applications that are designed to take advantage of its versatile no-locking memory access system. Clients are available in several different programming languages, to suit the needs of the specific application. Traditionally this has been used in mod_perl apps to avoid storing large chunks of data in Apache memory, and to share this burden across several machines. Caching other content is a good idea too.

Homepage: http://www.danga.com/memcached/

Follow this guide to install memcached.

Here is a simple script to query and cache MySQL data for 10 seconds.

$start = microtime(true);

$mem = new Memcached();
$mem->addServer("127.0.0.1", 11211);

mysql_connect("localhost", "dbuser", "dbpass") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("databasename") or die(mysql_error());

$query = "SELECT COUNT(*) AS TotalUsers FROM databasename WHERE 1";
$querykey = "TotalUsers" . md5($query);

$result = $mem->get($querykey);

if ($result) {
    
    print "

Data was: " . $result[0] . "

";
    print "

Caching success!

Retrieved data from memcached!

";

} else {
    
    $result = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query($query)) or die(mysql_error());
    $mem->set($querykey, $result, 10);
    print "

Data was: " . $result[0] . "

";
    print "

Data not found in memcached.

Data retrieved from MySQL and stored in memcached for next time.

";
}

$end = microtime(true);
$time = number_format(($end - $start), 6);
 
echo 'This page loaded in ', $time, ' seconds';

For me, the cached page loaded 0.022076 seconds faster than without Memcache per page. A small MySQL database is fast but a cached database is faster.
V1.2 added memcached link

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