Caching and Why We Need It
Ever since the creation of interpreted languages and the birth of dynamic web content, developers have been on the lookout for tools, workarounds, and extensions in search of a solution for a solution to bring maximum performance to the world of dynamically-generated web pages.
Perhaps the simplest, most straight-forward, and most effective of these solutions is the caching technique. In most caching implementations, the dynamic content generated by user requests to a particular URI on a server trigger the caching mechanism which then stores the generated content in a "storage facility" somewhere. Future requests to the same URI retrieve the stored content rather than spend time and effort re-creating the response.
The most-popular method of caching involves the archiving of the complete HTML response generated by the webserver and then stored as a static content on the hard drive for retrieval at a later date (usually with some mechanism responsible for expiring the content upon certain actions or after a set amount of time).
Today is Pi-Day 2008. A day in honor of Pi, one of the oldest and most mysterious mathematical constants known to man. A day in celebration of the works of dozens of great mathematicians and scholars. A day to revel in the glory and power of Pi. For those of you that live in the USA and use the MM/DD date representation format, the reason should be clear enough: March 14th, 2008 == 3.14.
As promised in our last post, we have some