Pro Drupal 7 Development, Third Edition

Chapter 16. Caching

Building pages for dynamic web sites requires numerous trips to the database to retrieve information about saved content, site settings, the current user, and so on. Saving the results of these expensive operations for later use is one of the easiest ways within the application layer to speed up a sluggish site. And it's not just database calls that are saved: the processing of the retrieved information in PHP is avoided too. Drupal's built-in cache API does this automatically for most core data and provides a number of tools for Drupal developers who want to leverage the API for their own purposes. For example, the memcache module (http://drupal.org/project/memcache) is an example of memory-based caching that makes use of ...