What is SuperCacher, How Does it Work?
SuperCacher is a web caching service developed internally and exclusively at SiteGround. It sits in front of your web server (e.g. Apache). Whenever a browser requests to load a web page from your web server, the web server returns the HTML result to the browser AND the cache stores a copy of that same page. Next time that particular page is requested, the request gets served from the cache directly while the web server sits idle. Cache is known to significantly reduce the impact of many visitors/hits onto your website’s loading speed by sparing the resources of your host server and delivering the websites impressively faster.
Three Layers of Caching by SiteGround SuperCacher
Static Cache
The simplest form of caching is static cache. What it does is when a page of your site is loaded, it takes a copy of your static content – e.g. Images, CSS Stylesheets, Java Scripts, Flash Objects, etc. – and puts them into the servers’ RAM Memory. Next time that same object is required – say an image – it would be loaded from the servers’ RAM which is dramatically faster than loading an image from the Servers’ hard drives. And should you multiply this by a big number of visitors at the same time, the impact would be… spectacular.
Memcached
Probably the most popular memory caching system that is used by thousands of database-driven sites on the Internet including YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia. It speeds up these websites by caching results from database queries in RAM. Thus, if the result of the same query is needed again, it will be instantaneously taken from the RAM, rather than generated again from the Database, which is usually a slower process and requires more computing power.
Dynamic Cache
It differs from Static cache and Memcached by one simple thing – the latter two only cache parts of your website – e.g. images or a query result. With Dynamic Cache the whole web pages are cached. Every time the webserver generates an HTML page from the PHP, that page is cached by SuperCacher. Next time that page is requested, the pure HTML would be displayed form the Cache which is in RAM, and as opposed to wasting CPU and I/O resources to read the PHP file from the disk, the cached result is much faster to display with almost none resources wasted.
SuperCacher Results
Each caching level of our SuperCacher service can increase website performance hundreds of times and reduce the impact of your website onto the server dramatically. We do activate all three layers of caching simultaneously for your website, and get outstanding results – see above image about seo-services-bristol.co.uk site Google PageSpeed test. Did we say this helps for web visitors retention and for search engine rankings?
See the speed matters guide.
