Caching JSON data

Question

I've never really cached data before, but I feel as though it will greatly improve my site.

Basically, I pull JSON data from an external API that helps the basic functionality of my website. This info doesn't really change that often yet my users pull the info from the API thousands of times a day. If it updated once a day, that would be fine. I want to run a cron job daily that will pull the info and update the cache.

I already tried a few different things, both pulled using PHP:

1) Store data in an SQL table
    I had it working, but there's no reason why I should ping the database each time when I can just store it in basic HTML/JSON.

2) .JSON file (using fwrite)
    I had it stored, but the only way this worked is if the .getJSON() callback function is prepended to the JSON data and then the data is surrounded by parentheses (making it jsonp, I believe).

Does anyone have any advice or any directions to lead me in? As I said, I've never really done anything like this so I don't even know if I'm remotely headed in the right direction.

Edit:

Okay so I talked to my hosting and since I'm on a shared hosting (dreamhost) I can't install memcached, which sucks. The only info they could give me was that if it is on http://pecl.php.net/ then I can most likely use it. They said APC is available. I'm not sure if this fits my problem. I'd like to be able to access the cache directly in jQuery. Thanks

Answer 1

You can use memcached. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Very easy to implement and has a low system footprint.

Answer 2

Since you can't use memcached, go back to your database option and store it in a table using the MEMORY engine.