On his blog today, Mike Willbanks has started up a new series that will look at various caching techniques that are available to PHP developers now:

Welcome to the first edition of the PHP performance series, a new series that I will be explaining ways to gain efficiencies and squeezing more performance out of your applications. This first edition, caching techniques, focuses on ways to cache data to optimize your current sites. Some of the concepts here are fairly easy to implement while others may take strategic design in the architecture of your application.

The methods he looks at this time are:

• Opcode Caching
• File Priming
• Caching Variables
• File Caching
• Memory Caching
• Database Memory Tables
• RAM Disk