On DevShed today, they have posted a new article that looks at some cost-effective solutions to caching in PHP.

With many websites using a database backend for storing and delivering content, certain common problems arise. One of these is a situation that causes the server to slow down or even bring the system to a complete halt. What can you do to reduce the load on your server? This tutorial discusses one method, a result set caching system, and demonstrates how to implement it with either a procedural or an object-oriented approach.

The main objective of this article series is to demonstrate how to implement a result set caching system, either taking a procedural approach or an object-oriented solution, in this way reducing the overall server overload when working with high traffic database-driven websites.

There are a few methods they recommend, including: improving the performance "naturally", making calls as infrequently as possible, and serializing/unserializing the data. It's a pretty simple system they develop, and, obviously, it could be improved upon, but it's a nice start...