In this scenario, you have a custom built blog application that has a section with the latest posts. Instead of constantly pulling this text from the database or saving the output to text files, which can be slow, saving the test into memory may be the best solution.

Take the following code:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY date LIMIT 5";
$query = mysql_query($sql);
if(mysql_num_rows($query)
{
     while($row=mysql_fetch_array($query))
     {
          echo "
".$row['title']."

";
     }
}

Lets make that faster.

$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->connect('memcache_host', 11211);
if(!$memcache->get('recent_posts'))
{
     $sql = "SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY date LIMIT 5";
     $query = mysql_query($sql);
     $post_array = array();
     if(mysql_num_rows($query)
     {
          while($row=mysql_fetch_array($query))
          {
               $post_array[] = $row;
          }
     }
    //recent expires in one hour
    $memcache->set('recent_posts',$post_Array, 0, 3600);
}

$recent_posts = $memcache->get('recent_posts');
for($i=0;$i".$recent_posts[$i]['title']."

";
}

You won’t notice a large increase if your site is small, but if you have a busy site and you have a bunch of spare ram, you might as well put it to use. In the future I will show you some more examples of real-world usage of Memcached.

Instead of having two different arrays of data to show a user’s information, you can combine both arrays together with array_merge(). This is one of my favorite php functions as it really saves you hassles.

This:

echo $forum_array['name']." - ".$blog_array['blogpost_count'];

Can become:

echo $user['name']." - ".$user['blogpost_count'];

Not only is it already shorter, but there is less to have to remember. All the data is right there. And to do that all you would need to do is:

$user = array_merge($forum_array,$blog_array);

Of course array_merge() can be used for other things as well, such as combining POST and GET data into a single array (which hopefully you would run an XSS check on it all).