In PHP web development, how do I use caching?

Caching is a technique used to store a copy of a given resource and serve it to reduce the time taken to retrieve the resource from the source. Implementing caching in PHP can greatly enhance the performance of web applications.

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Learn how to implement caching in PHP to optimize your web application's performance and reduce loading times.

Caching Example in PHP

<?php // Start the session session_start(); // Simple file caching example function getCachedData($filename, $cacheTime = 3600) { // Check if cache file exists and is still valid if (file_exists($filename) && (time() - filemtime($filename) < $cacheTime)) { // Read from cache return file_get_contents($filename); } else { // Fetch fresh data (could be a database query or API call) $data = "This is fresh data. Current time: " . date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // Save fresh data to cache file_put_contents($filename, $data); return $data; } } // Filename for caching $cacheFile = 'cache/data_cache.txt'; // Get data from cache or generate new data $output = getCachedData($cacheFile); // Output the data echo $output; ?>

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