Nobody denies that building a website without caching can be faster and more engaging. When you create a website, the main goal is to make it fast. Google places a higher load on mobile search results which compels the website to up the game when it comes to providing quality web content for users.

Improving website performance is an issue many businesses are faced with. No one wants to wait more than a few seconds for a webpage to load. For this reason, caching has become an increasingly popular topic that people are researching on the web. This article talks about 5 of the most popular Linux caching tools on the market today and what they're best at so that you can find one that's just right for your needs.

Why Caching?

The goal of caching is to store a website page’s content so that future visitors will have their experience sped up, as they won’t need to wait for the site to be processed from scratch. With this in mind, caching tools work by storing copies of the most common content provided on your site, typically displayed with what you might see as “old news” links on a blog or news site. This speeds things up by getting information from a cache database without fetching data from the database or recomputing the data.

1. Redis

Redis Cache is a popular in-memory database that is very fast and has a robust ecosystem of libraries, modules, and extensions. It is a key-value store where the values correspond to string values or Data structure types for more complex values such as lists or hashes. Redis caches content periodically.

Redis provides a variety of data structures. These include strings, hashes, lists, sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis has built-in replication and Lua scripting, and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.

Download Link: https://redis.io/download

2. Memcached

Memcached is a free and open-source caching system, meaning it is open for everyone to use and customize. Memcached is intended to be used in speeding up dynamic web applications, alleviating database load.

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that allows you to cache content on your web server and deliver results much faster.

Memcached is a key-value store made to store small chunks of arbitrary data. Memcached can be used to cache the results of database calls and API calls. Memcached is simple and powerful. Its simplicity when it was created promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems when dealing with large data caches.

Its API is available for most popular languages.

Download Link: https://memcached.org/

3. Varnish HTTP Cache

Varnish Cache is a web application delivery accelerator. It speeds up or rather ensures that a website will run faster. This is thanks to a preloading program that works in the background and stores data in the cache which is then made accessible for when it's needed later.

Varnish can be configured to accept requests from any backend server and also has the potential to produce very high reading speeds with its "varying-window" policy. It has been designed with portability in mind and is known for being easy to set up on most platforms with minimum fuss.

Website: https://varnish-cache.org/

4.Couchbase

Couchbase is a distributed NoSQL database, providing unmatched performance and scalability across a range of deployment environments. Couchbase delivers the power and financial benefits of a database in virtually any environment for any application.

Couchbase is a key-value store. It holds a large number of values which can be anything from keys and their corresponding values, to active records and entities. Couchbase doesn't require a schema which means that it automatically acknowledges any new data added, particularly JSON documents without any need for user input or configuration planning.

Website: https://www.couchbase.com/

5. Facebook Mcrouter

Mcrouter is a caching proxy for web content that is designed to work with most, if not all, of the commonly available web servers. Mcrouter can be used by any server that speaks TCP, including Linux.

Mcrouter can be used to turn a normal router into a content caching appliance. As the Internet moves from IPv4 to IPv6, Mcrouter may take on a larger role in content delivery networks. It uses a process called EVCD, "event-driven client-server," which would see if a copy of a requested object was available on the same network before going out onto the Internet. This drastically speeds up website loading times.

It's a core component of cache infrastructure at Facebook and Instagram where mcrouter handles almost 5 billion requests per second at peak.

Website: https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter

Conclusion

Having a faster website is essential if you want to make the most of your time and resources. If you don’t have much experience with caching or you need a refresher, one of these tools will make your life easier.

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