I wrote the original APC Object Cache backend for WordPress back in 2006. Shared it via a link on the wp-hackers list, and until a few days ago, hadn’t touched it since.
It has now been updated to version 2.0.1, and should work more efficiently. It supports increment/decrement, and you can now use it to power Batcache, the whole-page caching engine used on WordPress.com! In fact, for single-server sites, it should perform a lot better than Batcache + Memcached (because Memcached is a separate application and connections from PHP have some latency).
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read on.
WordPress has a built-in object caching API. It is usually used to store complex data objects or HTML structures which are computationally expensive to create on the fly. By default, the engine is implemented in PHP memory. That means that objects don’t persist in-between requests. The only benefit there is if you’re accessing the same objects multiple times on one request.
Enter persistent object cache backends. These backends store the data objects between page loads, which saves your server a lot of time and speeds up the user experience. APC is both an opcode cache (which speeds up PHP in general) and an in-memory key/value store which persists between page loads. If you have it installed (or can install it), I highly recommend that you do so. Unfortunately this probably won’t be available to anyone on shared hosting — VPS/dedicated only. Once you have APC up and running, as confirmed by phpinfo();, install the APC Object Cache in your WordPress content directory. It is a special kind of plugin, and will not work if placed anywhere else. It also needs to keep its name: object-cache.php
You should notice improved page load times! I’ve seen it improve page generation time 10x.
And what about Batcache? Batcache is a whole-page or “HTML output” caching engine. It stores complete web pages and saves them for later. It needs a persistent object cache backend to function. Furthermore, it needs an object cache backend that supports incrementation (counters, to measure how much traffic each URL is getting), and that does its own object expiration. Memcached has fit the bill, and is the preferred solution for multi-web-server WordPress installs. Now with the new version of the APC Object Cache, there is a preferred single server solution as well.
Note: W3 Total Cache users need not apply — it handles its own object caching, including support for APC.
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