The Perl Cache modules are designed to assist a developer in persisting data for a specified period of time. Often these modules are used in web applications to store data locally to save repeated and redundant expensive calls to remote machines or databases. People have also been known to use Cache::Cache for its straightforward interface in sharing data between runs of an application or invocations of a CGI-style script or simply as an easy to use abstraction of the filesystem or shared memory.
Cache::Cache is in wide use and very stable, but has not changed in years and is no longer actively developed.
CHI is the successor to Cache::Cache. It adheres to the basic Cache::Cache API but adds new features and drivers (e.g. FastMmap and Memcached), improves performance, and attempts to address limitations in the Cache::Cache implementation.
The first thing you will need is a copy of the Cache::Cache modules. The most recent version is 1.05 and can be found here:
Older version can be downloaded from:
First, choose the best type of cache implementation for your needs. The simplest cache is the MemoryCache, which is suitable for applications that are serving multiple sequential requests, and wish to avoid making redundant expensive queries, such as an Apache/mod_perl application talking to a database. If you wish to share that data between processes, then perhaps the SharedMemoryCache is appropriate, although its behavior is tightly bound to the underlying IPC mechanism, which varies from system to system, and is unsuitable for large objects or large numbers of objects. When the SharedMemoryCache is not acceptable, then FileCache offers all of the same functionality with similar performance metrics, and it is not limited in terms of the number of objects or their size. If you wish to maintain a strict limit on the size of a file system based cache, then the SizeAwareFileCache is the way to go. Similarly, the SizeAwareMemoryCache and the SizeAwareSharedMemoryCache add size management functionality to the MemoryCache and SharedMemoryCache classes respectively.
Using a cache is simple. Here is some sample code for instantiating and using a file system based cache.
use Cache::FileCache;
my $cache = new Cache::FileCache( );
my $customer = $cache->get( $name );
if ( not defined $customer )
{
$customer = get_customer_from_db( $name );
$cache->set( $name, $customer, "10 minutes" );
}
return $customer;
The first place to look is at the full README file and the documentation for the Cache::Cache interface. For the complete documentation, please refer to the HTML automatically generated by search.cpan.org.
Please refer to the Perl Cache project homepage hosted at SourceForge, the Perl Cache project on Google Code, and the Perl Cache discussion list on Google Groups.
Additionally, the Apache/mod_perl has been the real community behind the Perl Cache development.
The Perl Cache library is written and maintained by DeWitt Clinton.