Peter Lind wrote:
Your posts seem to indicate that caches are only useful when other parts of the app have been done wrong. My point was that this is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of caches - regardless of what you are or aren't capable of optimizing.
CHACHES are only useful when there are static views of the information available. Only static elements can be cached with any real chance of performance improvement, so part of what Tommy is saying is correct. Although the way he has worded that is perhaps a little misleading?
A framework should provide a base that applies caching at the correct level, such as pre-processing smarty templates so that they can be loaded quicker, or caching static data such as selection lists ... which DOES require a more in depth understanding of the target since you need to know what lists are slow changing and what are dynamic. I suppose the discussion here is perhaps where a library becomes a fully fledged framework, and 'ORM' is another area where there is a diversity of database abstraction libraries in addition to the more common ones. Data caching SHOULD always be the domain of the database, so duplicating that in PHP is pintless.
It would be nice to have a more prominent leader which could be supported by integral caching and other performance enhancing tools, but Tommy is right when he says that caching 'used' to improve performance in some of these frameworks where all that is required is a much better understanding of the base data. bitweaver port eliminated some 90% of the queries on the database simply by restructuring things away from the original tikiwiki format. So much so that the caching process actually produces a substantial additional improvement, while the original structure was spending most of it's time simply trying to work out what cahe elements to read ... and of cause eaccelerator adds another layer of 'caching' over that :)
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