Don Raman has a new post to his IIS blog today with a quick bit of information that Joomla users could use to get better performance with WinCache, integrated directly into the CMS's caching system.

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta released which has got implementation for both user and session cache, one can easily take advantage of WINCACHE user cache and increase performance of Joomla. In this post I am going to tell you steps to use WINCACHE user cache with Joomla.

There's a class you'll need to copy and paste to create a new Joomla caching component, but after that it's as easy as having the WinCache tool installed and changing your configuration options to use the new wincache connector class for the CMS's caching.

Here's a direct link to grab this latest version of WinCache since it only works with version 1.1.0 and higher - WinCache.zip.

On the PHP-HTML.net site today there's a new tutorial about creating something that could give your site a pretty big performance boost - a simple method for caching your data.

Cache is a programming concept that can be used in a various range of applications and for various purposes. A cache library can be used for storing database queries for later use, to store rendered pages to be served again without generating them again, or to save indexed pages in a crawler application to be processed by multiple modules.

They include the code to create a very basic filesystem-based caching system for any kind of data you need. It sets expiration times and stores each bit of information in its own cache file to avoid overlap on read/write. This is a pretty simple example of data caching, but it gives you an idea of something that can help speed up your application. If you need something with a little more power, you might check out memcached.

Christian Flickinger has written up a new blog post today showing some of the benchmarks he's worked up around the performance of various caching tools with the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft coming out as a leader.

The [WinCache] documentation makes no mention of Apache, only IIS. I decided to give it a try, and to my amazement, WinCache worked in Apache on Windows. After that I decided to compare the performance of WinCache with the other available options for Windows+Apache.

He defines his testing environment - hardware, software and the different opcode caching tools - and includes his testing technique. His results, measured in requests per second, are interesting but show that, for his configuration, the WinCache tool's performance topped the others on Windows.

New on the ProDevTips.com blog there's an article talking about the use of memcached on Dapper to increase the overall performance of the site.

Memcached is a very simple thing at heart; a daemon that runs in the background and that can be called from your code to store a value with the help of a key, and then retrieve said value with the help of the key used to store it; and it all happens in the RAM.

He talks briefly about the installation of the memcached server (on Ubuntu, in his case) via the source including a little trick he needed to do to get it to work correctly with the ld.so.conf file. He also includes the code for a simple class to implement it in your application.

On his IIS.net blog Don Raman is asking for help in testing Microsoft's WinCache caching tool because of a critical fix they had to make to the current version.

There has been several instances where people using WINCACHE have reported problem while running it on the actual production server. They have complained that WINCACHE works very well on development server but the users can see a crash (or different symptoms of it) while actually deploying it on a live production server.

There have been several reports of the issue where the site visitor gets an empty page back and WinCache will crash. For those wanting to get into the technical details, the post includes them or, if you just want to find out more about the bug, there's a few email addresses you can contact the WinCache team at.

On the ServerGrove blog there's a recent post about the speed boost that you can get using APC caching (with an example of a symfony application's perfomance).

I've been developing a website based on symfony. Since symfony 1.3 and 1.4 came out this week, I decided to upgrade it to 1.3 and then when I feel confortable to 1.4. [...] Then, I decided to run some benchmarks using ab (Apache Benchmark) to see how symfony 1.2 and 1.3 compared. To my surprise, I did not see an improvement on speed. I was expecting the new version would be faster, but for some reason I am not seeing any improvements.

When his testing showed no noticeable results, he turned on view caching in the framework. This helped a good bit but the real boost came when he implemented APC caching. His requests per second jumped from fourteen up to seventy, a five-fold improvement.

Richard Thomas has posted a new "short" for users of the Solar Framework to delete cached data.

This one is simple but sweet, In your Models directory you define your Models and the basic rules they follow but do you know you can also make changes at the record level. Solar is smart and if it sees a Test/Record.php when creating records for the Test model it will load that class, this allows you to do all kinds of magic.

His example shows how the script can automatically check, on pre-save, to see if the data is different than that in the cache and remove it if so. This cached data is replaced the next time through with the latest information.

Richard Thomas has posted another Solar short with a quick tip on using the framework to cache data correctly (and under different prefixes) automatically even for multi-tenant sites.

This gets even more problematic if you support third party developers/modules as they have to follow the same rules as well. Head problems off at the pass by using the Solar_Cache prefix config. This bit of code would be placed as soon you "identify" the site in question and get some sort of unique id for that site.

All it takes is creating a Solar_Cache object (set into the Solar_Registry object) with the prefix for any and all scripts to pull out and use. This can even be used with the Solar models to cache data pulled from the database automatically.

New in the Zend Developer Zone today is this post looking at the Zend Server GUI and how you can extend it to add in data from the Data Cache API.

As the GUI of Zend Server is based on the open-source Zend Framework, you can easily extend it. This article demonstrates how to integrate new functionality to Zend Server which makes it possible see the content and some meta information of cached items. For this example I use the Data Cache API from Zend Server, but in combination with the Zend Framework component Zend_Cache and its Zend_Cache_Backend_ZendServer_Disk backend adapter.

He steps through the creation of a new Zend_Cache object and an implementation of the Zend_Cache_Backend_Interface as well as making the new tab for the data to live under in the GUI. The interface is dropped in place and a view and model is added and your end result can look like this.

As is mentioned in this new article from Visual Studio Magazine today, a new caching accelerator for PHP has been released for the Windows platform.

The new "Windows Cache Extension for PHP" solution, currently in beta release, is an accelerator that works with the PHP engine in Windows and Windows Server. Microsoft released two versions. Users of PHP 5.2 can download the beta here, while PHP 5.3 users can get it here.

The extension works with the Web Platform Installer and IIS versions 7.5, 7.0, 6.5 and 5.1. Ruslan Yakushev has blogged a bit more information about the extension noting that it only works with non-thread-safe builds of PHP and IIS needs to be able to use FastCGI modules.

For more details on using the extension, check out this guide from Microsoft.