Caching Best Practices

More of a tutorial on APC and Memcached APIs than advice on best practice. Aimed a bit more towards novices than I expected.

As someone who hasn't used Memcached or APC I found this very helpful. I will definitely be making use of Memcached from now on.

I think he explained the 'biggest smallest reusable data' principle really well too, with some good practical examples from working on Digg.

I'm looking forwards to applying the things I learnt from this talk!

Very broad presentation on the caching issues and how to overcome them. How to get the the best performance by using cache. Where to apply each layer, advantages and disadvantages. Very inspiring talk overall.

A great well rounded and practised talk delivered well. Good intro to caching backed up with solid first hand experience.

First slides interesting, couple of interesting points but had too much of a tutorial. The only real interesting talking point was about the green dots on Dogg but that was the last slide and glossed over. Would have liked more real world experience examples like that.

Could have done with some more complex caching strategy examples, 50% of the talk was pretty straightforward. But I found the rest of it quite affirming of techniques that I have used already. A well rounded talk aimed at relatively inexperienced cachers!

I agree with some of the other comments about this feeling more like a tutorial than how to deal with actual best practices. However Eli did cover some important topics that many developers fail to address.

Very clear talk and very good introduction to caching for people who are not familiar with it. Very much a beginner talk though, didn't really contain any advanced of intermediate stuff. Bonus points, I did enjoy hearing some of the techniques used by Digg in the past!

I enjoyed the talk, but feel that it was more of an introduction. That being said, the range of insights from the time at Digg really helped provide insight into when and why to use caching. So, very worthwhile.

This was a really good talk, lots of solid, useful technical material and while it did begin at the beginning, I thought it went off nicely into some depth and explained different types of caching well. I found it offputting that the speaker was speaking to and pointing at his slides - this was a main track talk so people need to see you, not the back of you, and there are relay screens as well which you can't point at. Recommend you put in line numbers or highlights and refer to your code that way - it will scale better.

Best of all: I *loved* the stories, not many people have such a credible CV for this type of work and it made the techniques come alive.

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone! To address the last one about 'pointing at the slides'. Unfortunately this was a bit of a case of just not having the venue explained well enough to the speaker. I've been very used to speaking at conferences where you are broken up into smaller room situations, smaller screens, less 'stage'.

In fact I used to carry a laser pointer with me for EXACTLY those cases when I was on a 'big stage' and needed to point. But I stopped carrying it because it seemed useless since every venue (save ZendCon Main Stage) put me standing right next to the projector screen anyway.

But yeah, had the 'nature of the venue' been shared ahead of time. I would have planned a different style of presentation that wasn't so reliant on code samples. OR, would have put the effort into having click-through highlighting on each line-item to make it easy to visualize the discussion.

Thanks again everyone!

Nice talk about caching from someone who has real experience with it.

This was first time I ever heard about igbinary what a nice tip to get few milliseconds and also spare lot of space!

Sometimes it was hard to follow this talk, caching right after the lunch :-).