The other day, my boss asked me to find a way to increase the performance of PHP requests when it comes to searching/filtering/sorting with Datatables (Any CRUD would have the same issue, but in our case, we use Datatables a lot) He was trying to convince me that PHP should be able to keep objects in memory like Java does (he comes from JSP) so we can just manipulate the object as we need, without having to go to the database everytime. And, i was trying to convince him the PHP lives and dies based on requests and there is no such things as object permanency with PHP, at least not the same way Java or C# deals with it.
We use Datatables to list records from an Oracle database to the user, using a dirt-simple, custom class we created, to query the DB and send results in an object DT expects. Then they can filter, search, sort the dataset as they want. Calling the DB everytime they sort or filter gets its toll on performance when we talk about tables with million of records being queried, then limited to 10 per page.
Anyways, I ended up telling him I'll look around, so I looked around the web, found memcache, APC, APCu, looked around here too, found answers that were close to what I need but not quite there.
Memcache is server-based, APC is basically OPCache and APCu looks like more or less what I need, but with a lot of requests, it becomes fragmented and slows down(or so people say).
I just need a way to keep a dataset around for a while, so that the user can get a list of records, by slice of 10(or whatever they choose, as long as it's not the whole dataset, since client-side should not be holding millions of records just for fun...). I don't expect Facebook,Amazon or Google kind of speeds, but i need requests faster than 30secs just to filter a dataset that will show only 10 records at a time...
By the way, I am a noob when it comes to caching. I've been using PHP for work for quite a few years already, I know a lot, but when it comes to caching solutions, I have no clue what I'm talking about...
Any help i can get would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Nope, not a duplicate of This one... The question itself may sound like the other one, but the issue is definitely not the same. I need a simple but efficient way to cache those things, and I'm asking broadly. With file-based caching there's a whole concept of managing those files. The users may only load the list once then leave to another page, they may load it multiple times with different filters, then they may decide to hang there for a while, then search again. File-based may not be the solution here... And a simple "See this question, they have what you may want" would have sufficed.. With all due respect to the StackOverflow community, which i find awesome, i feel like some people are quick on the trigger and don't even seem to try to read or even understand the description before marking as duplicate, without even any kind of useful answer or explanation (I don't mean only my question, it's a common concept i tend to see more and more on this forum)