By now, we're writing some pretty complex code. The server has to sit down and puzzle out each dynamically generated page. While it's simple for you to write a function like the show_errors
, shown previously, the poor old server has to do more work as a result.
Sometimes, this can lead to your pages taking a longer time to load than you would like. There may be no way out of this. If you're writing a report that will be different each time then you just have to wait. However, you may be generating a page that will remain the same for a while. A blog, for instance, remains the same until you put another entry on it. If your blog gets a thousand views a day, on a day when you didn't add a new posting, each view will be the same. And it's a waste of time, for the system, to regenerate the same page over and over.
The way out of this is to cache the page. You generate the page once, and the HTML produced is saved in a cache
file with a timestamp, as well as being returned to someone...