The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial that want to help you speed up your applications with Redis, adding in caching to help reduce the overall processing load your app has to expend.

The application in question, when executing a query, runs off to Diffbot’s API and makes it query the dataset. The subset is then returned and displayed. This can take up to 5 or so seconds, depending on the busyness of Diffbot’s servers. While the situation will undoubtedly improve as they expand their computational capacity, it would be nice if a query executed once were remembered and reused for 24 hours, seeing as the collection is only refreshed that often anyway.

Considering the fact that implementing this cache costs us literally nothing (and actually reduces costs by reducing strain on the servers), adding it in is an easy win, even if it weren’t used as often as one would hope. There is no reason not to add it – it can only benefit us.

He helps you get Redis up and running as a service on the local system and installing the Predis, the PHP library you'll use to talk with Redis for setting and getting the cached information. He includes a few code snippets showing how to send the search off to the DiffBot API, return the results and push them into the cache as serialized data with a day long timeout. He also mentions the phpiredis extension to reduce some of the overhead that could be cause by using a PHP library versus an extension.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial by Daniel Gafitescu showing you how to work with Redis (a key-value store) via PHP with the help of the Predis library.

There is a lot of argument whether Redis or Memcache is better, though as the benchmarks show they perform pretty much on par with each other for basic operations. Redis has more features than Memcache has, such as in-memory and disk persistence, atomic commands and transactions, and not logging every change to disk but rather server-side data structures instead. In this article we'll take a look at some of the basic but powerful commands that Redis has to offer using the Predis library.

He helps you get a local redis server up and running and includes a link to the repository for the latest version of the Predis library. Some sample code is provided showing how to connect to the server, push data into a key/value combination, get the value back out, increment it and check to see if it exists. He also talks about some of the available data types Redis provides and a few other more complex operations you can perform on things other than strings.