John Main

This is a rather simple idea yet one that I see people failing to implement again and again with serious impacts on processor load and processing time as a result.

If you have a function within an object that does any processor-intensive logic (complex SQL queries etc) and this function will be run more than once in a single execution thread of your application then caching the output of that function could make a big difference.

Very simply, all you need is to create an object variable to hold the cached output of the function and then within your function add a conditional like so:

if(!$this->cached_function_output) {
	//Do your logic

	$this->cached_function_output = $result_of_logic;
}

return $this->cached_function_output;

It’s just that simple! And you can ‘expire’ your cache any time you like by simply setting its value to null:

$this->cached_function_output = null;