Create Digital Media

New Caching System for Wordpress: Batcache

By jaymis

Peter isn’t quite in the habit of sharing our internal CDM research and communiques to the rest of the world, so I’ll re-post his words:

Another caching solution for WP. This story also goes through some of the more generalized performance issues with WP and other solutions…
http://andy.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/batcache-for-wordpress/

This is the system they use for Wordpress.com:

Batcache implements a very simplistic caching model that shields your database and web servers from traffic spikes: after a document has been requested X times in Y seconds, the document is cached for Z seconds and all new users are served the cached copy.

New users are defined as anybody who hasn’t interacted with your domain—once they’ve left a comment or logged in, their cookies will ensure they get fresh pages. People arriving from Digg won’t notice that the comments are a minute or two behind but they’ll appreciate your site being up.

You don’t need PHP skills to install Batcache but you do have to get Memcached working first. That can be easy or hard. We use Memcached because it’s awesome. Once you know how to install it you can create the same kind of distributed, persistent cache that underpin web giants like WordPress.com and Facebook.

Interesting. Will probably be giving this a spin soon.