There are sessions about caching for beginners, that explain the basic concepts.

There are sessions about caching for intermediates, that tell you how cool Varnish is.

This is not one of those sessions.

You should already have an intermediate knowledge of caching: what it is, how it works, and the most common caching technologies such as Varnish, Memcache, and APC. Because we're going deep.

Drupal 7's caching subsystem (and D6's Cache Router) allows modules to define custom cache "buckets", and lets site administrators define which cache technology should handle which bucket. There are modules like Entity Cache which add cache buckets, and change the structure of your site's caches. Then there are modules that add caching technologies like Memcache. We go through them all, one at a time, with benchmarks and charts. We explain what they do, their individual approaches to caching, their pros, their cons, and what they can help you with.

And then we match them up. Which technology is best for block cache? Where should you cache Drupal's Bootstrap, or Entity Cache? What's the difference between Memcache and Redis? Should your page cache use File Cache, Boost, Varnish... or a combination? How should you use Authcache for authenticated users?

Finally, we'll apply our knowledge with case studies from well known Drupal caching challenges like examiner.com, earthday.org, and xomba.com .

Technologies covered:

• Drupal DB cache
• File cache
• APC
• Memcache
• Redis
• Boost
• Varnish
• Edge Side Includes
• NGINX proxy cache
• Entity Cache
• Block Cache Alter
• Core cache buckets
• Cache Actions
• Auth Cache