I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected.
What is that mistake?
The ecommerce package I was working with depended on
caching. Out of the box it couldn't serve 10 pages/second
unless I enabled some features which were designed to be
"optional" (but clearly they weren't).
I think with great tools like memcached it is easy to get carried away and use it as the mallet for every performance problem, but in many cases it should not be your first choice. Here is why:
- Caching might not work for all visitors - You look at a page, it loads fast. But is this the same for every user? Caching can sometimes be an optimization that makes the average user have a faster experience, but in reality you should be caring more that …