---Updated for OpenCart 2.0---

Safely increase the speed of your store by converting OpenCart's hard drive based caching approach to memory. This non-invasive caching uses OpenCart's already existing caching mechanisms to implement Memcached. Additionally, this extension adds individual product and category caching to speed up every area of your website (Pro-version only).

WHAT IS MEMCACHED?
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Memcached is a "high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load." It is used extensively by sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Wikipedia.

HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO OTHER CACHING SOLUTIONS?
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1) Many other caching solutions are hard-drive based. While you may get to avoid database calls, you are going to be limited by the speed of your hard drive to serve that information. Also, any hard-drive based page cache extension will have a hard time with individual product page caching (creating, deleting, and modifying thousands and thousands of temporary files on your server is not a good idea).

2) Some solutions do far to much processing. This caching solution is for developers familiar with good practices in building a template. Your javascript and CSS files should already be minified on a production environment, and any script that does that on the fly is going to tax your CPU every page load.

3) This solution is not invasive to your OpenCart installation. It safely modifies the existing caching mechanism already in place, and leaves all functions and calls to the cache untouched.

4) Any additional extensions you have installed that use OpenCart's cache will automatically switch to Memcached, no extra code required.


HOW DOES OPENCART BENEFIT FROM MEMCACHE?
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By default, OpenCart's caching mechanism stores all cache files in /system/cache. Each cache file is either a single database result, or a collection of several rows of database results. Because it reads and writes from that folder, its speed is limited by how fast the hard drive can react to many tiny files. Also, since we are dealing with so many tiny files, the OpenCart developers have opted to not include caching for individual product pages.

Memcache excels at handling these tiny database results. The speed of your server's memory is going to be far faster than your hard drives as well, making the read and writes near instant. Now that the read/write speed has increased, we can safely cache thousands of product pages and categories.

Since this extension safely hooks in with the existing OpenCart cache, any changes you make to the site will invalidate the cache and rebuild the next time the pages are hit.


FEATURES
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- Memcached (memory-based caching)
- Major increase to site speed
- Adds individual product page caching
- Adds category caching
- Template independent
- Multilingual
- Multi-store support

IMPORTANT: Before purchasing this extension please review the "Documentation" area for notes on purchasing and a free test script.

For any questions regarding this extension please feel free to contact me through my company website (http://elementdesignllc.com), or by visiting the forum topic here: http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=123&t=83999