A successor to WP-Cache has emerged. Donncha O Caoimh has just released the first public version of WP Super Cache. WP Super Cache is based on WP-Cache but is superior in many ways. With no further development of WP-Cache, Donncha’s WP Super Cache is likely to become the defacto caching and anti-Digg/Slashdot solution for WordPress. Read on for details.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here and here), WP-Cache’s caching function is far from ideal. Out of the box, WP-Cache does not support gzip. Common solutions like on-the-fly compression with PHP or Apache’s mod_gzip/deflate can bring your site down during heavy load since recompression is performed per request of a cached page. I posted two days ago a modified version of WP-Cache which enables gzip compression more sensibly, by compressing a cached page once and serving the stored gzipped page from disk to future visitors. But I’ve scrapped all that for Donncha’s new WP Super Cache plugin. I admit to being slightly annoyed, going to all that trouble for two days’ enjoyment, but Super Cache simply rocks. 
WP Super Cache lowers your CPU overhead even more by bypassing the PHP engine altogether. Pages are stored as plain HTML in the wp-content/cache/supercache/ directory. Code in .htaccess instructs the web server to serve up these static HTML files, so not a single line of PHP is parsed. Furthermore, WP Super Cache can also optionally store gzip compressed versions of pages. Again with some code in .htaccess and no PHP processing, the web server handles all the negotiations with browsers to figure out if a plain HTML page should be served or a gzipped version of the page.
Note that users who are logged in and users who have written comments are served traditional WP-Cache handled cached pages and not Super Cache’s plain static HTML pages. This isn’t a big deal since most of your visitors won’t be leaving comments. Nevertheless, I wonder if the modifications to WP-Cache I posted previously can be incorporated in Super Cache to allow logged in users to enjoy cached and gzipped pages also.
Finally, WP Super Cache also has a plugin and hooks system which allows dynamic plugins to play nice with the caching system.
Any WordPress users interested in improving their blog’s performance should definitely give the super-efficient WP Super Cache a whirl.
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wow, didnt know there is super… I wonder will there be super-mega cache after this :p
Thanks