jpcache
If you run/code a PHP based sites, you owe it to yourself to check out jpcache. I've been using it here at PolarLava for at least the past year and a half. This bad boy will GZip compress your pages before they are sent to the browser, which cuts down on your bandwidth as well as speeds up your page loads. Additionally you can tell it to cache a page for a specified period of time. This makes those DB generated "static" pages into true static pages, thus making them much faster. And you have your choice of either storing your cached pages in flat files or a MySQL database, which is what I do.
Another alternative if you are distributing code but don't need caching, is my GZipContent class. It provides the benefit from GZipping compressing the output, but doesn't do any caching. If you are interested in this, just drop me a line.
Although it's not released as of this writing, GZContent will be part of PolarBlog beginning in V1.4.0. Although this blog actually doesn't nor will it be using that, as my whole site runs under jpcache. ;)
01/04/2005
A few weeks back I spent some time hacking on jpcache to implement a feature that I wanted, but it lacked. That being the ability to flush individual pages. I had added the ability to flush all pages, permanently cached pages or just expirable pages some time ago. But you still couldn't flush individual pages. Previously I had sent this basic flushing change to Jean-Pierre, the developer of this application for possible inclusion in a future release. Like all of us, he's busy and has not put out a new release in quite some time. Anyhow, I've pushed this modification a bit further now and have the ability to flush individually cached pages. Generally this is far more useful than flushing groups of pages, although sometimes that is useful too. I forwarded this latest change to Jean-Pierre who wrote me back to let me know that some form of this will make it into the next release of jpcache which he hopes to start on soon. Yeah!