We have now activated a simple caching engine on the homepage and all other pages featuring ‘most read’ and tagged content. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a continued increase in load on our servers due to an rapid increase in visitor count. This, unfortunately on some days, caused QueensSpeech.com to slow down to an unacceptable level. Even though we’d upgraded our main hosting servers, the extra traffic almost cancelled out the new hardware installation.

After reviewing both commercial and open source caching solutions on the market, we decided instead to develop our own simple caching engine, with the overall goal to decrease the number of dynamic calls to the database.

Phase I - we cached articles the homepage and ‘most read’ content blocks. In Phase II we launched caching on the ‘tag content blocks’. I’m pleased to say that since both phases have been rolled out, load on the servers has decreased. http://queensspeech.com now performs a lot lot better, with pages loading much faster and rendering times greatly reduced.