[Phpwiki-talk] PHP persistent caching

[Dan F. <dfr...@cs...>]

Folks,

I have a question for experienced PHP developers. There is a lot of 
information I can imagine wanting to cache across sessions in PHP. For 
example in WikiLens, a ratings database, or per-item statistics (# 
ratings, averages, etc). This is stuff that will fit in-memory for the 
forseeable future.

What's the best way to do that in PHP? I've looked at a couple of PEAR 
modules (e.g., "Cache" included in PhpWiki), and they seem to be 
file-based. This is astonishing to me. Clearly memory can be 1000 times 
faster than disk (although there are usually memory-based disk caches, 
too). Is it really best to use file-based caches? I thought about 
writing a shared memory-based cache, and a colleague warned me away from 
it, saying shared memory access in PHP is iffy.

Thoughts?

Dan