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I'm looking for a simple #Wordpress Cache plugin but after staring at the dozens of available candidates, I must admit I have no idea where to turn. I don't need an All-in-One SEO/PageSpeed/etc..., I just need a simple server-side cache that I can set up and forget. Memcached support is a plus as it's already available on my machine.

Any recommendation?
I'm also finding it hard these days to find single-purpose plugins. They all are so bloated & over-reaching.
I used wp fastest cache on all my sites and never had problems. I’m hosted on site ground now and they have their own cache plugin that is nice if you happen to be hosted there.
@Hypolite Petovan It was years ago, but if I remember correctly WP Super Cache ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ ) is what we were using when I worked at Rackspace's Managed Support (before they were sold).

If it's the one I remember, it stores all the cached files in a directory that mirrors the layout of your site, so you can have your server check for the static file before passing off to php.
Could you just run a reverse proxy like Nginx in front of it?
@Holly Schilling I’m already running Apache, maybe there’s something I can do about it directly in the web server software I’m already using? So far running nginx in front of Apache has sounded redundant to me, but I could be convinced otherwise.
Most my knowledge of Apache is from the 1.3 days, so I don’t really know what to tell you about that. However, with Nginx acting as a reverse proxy in front of WordPress, I was able to hit 100k pages/second at a job a few years ago.
@Holly Schilling Thanks for the suggestion, is using nginx this way equivalent to using Varnish?
I never used Varnish, but it looks comparable.
@Hypolite Petovan @Holly Schilling nginx in front of Apache is *absolutely* redundant and is not a cure-all.

A generic cache is only really good for high traffic (ie. the same thing being loaded over and over again within the same few minutes).

You'd want a smarter cache, I wish I remembered the specifics from way back when I worked at Rackspace, but the caching plugin we used was great for making static assets out of dynamic pages so your server could share them quickly without the bog of php.

Also, if you're not already, definitely recommend php-fpm.
@shiri The ideal situation is that you have lots of pages that get hit repeatedly and they are basically static. When you get away from that model, there be dragons. At its core, WordPress doesn’t scale well, so some form of caching in front of it is needed. If it is possible to pre-compile the pages as static HTML and push them to a CDN, that’s infinite scaling, but that often isn’t possible.

The advantage of having the Caching layer in front of the WordPress box is that it separates the caching config/performance from that of the content. It also allows multiple cache boxes to be behind a load balancer, all fed by the same content box.
@Holly Schilling @Hypolite Petovan I used to set them up all day every day, we were often managing the sites of the people going on Shark Tank and keeping a Wordpress site up and responsive during that load. And we didn't even use a CDN for it.

We set up a primary server with nginx and php-fpm, and a caching addon (iirc it was WP Super Cache) that cached a static copy of the site like you described. Nginx had a rule that basically checked if you were logged in, and if so it bypassed the cache files, otherwise it just served static content.

We then used lsyncd to mirror the site and cache files over to however many secondary servers we were using. All of those were set to server the static content and only send to the primary when you were logged in or it didn't have the file yet.

We then threw a load balancer in front of it, and it was solid as a rock. (There's certainly little config elements that I glossed over, like I remember we also used varnish for in-memory cache)
@shiri I stopped managing servers like this 10 years ago. Your methods sound the same as what we used, but more modern.

I mentioned the CDN part only as a benchmark. Things like a JAM stack can scale infidelity on a CDN due to no severe side work. Still, I don’t see much talk about a JAM stack website anymore.
@Shiri Bailem @Holly Schilling Thank you for the rundown, however I'm not trying to make my website a high-performing one. I was just wondering if I could leverage the infrastructure I already have for a cheap win.

I've never made the jump from Apache2 + PHP module to nginx + PHP-FPM in part because I use the Apache2 ITK MPM in order to assign a specific user to each virtual host, and that I've never found a replacement for it. The other part is that I'm utterly unfamiliar with nginx's configuration syntax, and I've never had a professional environment where I would have learned to set it up, so I've chugged along with Apache2.
@Shiri Bailem Thank you for the elaboration, I know the theory of performance improvement with nginx + PHP-FPM, but the few times I’ve tried, the 503 errors I couldn’t troubleshoot gave me cold feet. The separation between the web server and the PHP runtime that provides the performance boost also increases the number of points of failure in a system that is still unfamiliar to me, so I didn’t push through the pain.
@Shiri Bailem I also feel compelled to declare that out of principle, I will never use a third-party LLM software, but that I don’t judge anyone for doing so.
@Hypolite Petovan I respect your principles even though they don't align with my own and I respect your withholding judgement.
for times when redis or memcached aren't options (or are too much work to add), I've been using this SQLite object cache plugin with good results. https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-object-cache/