how to cache the twitter api result?

Question

I would like to cache the result of the twitter api result and display them to users..

What's the best method to cache the result?

I'm thinking a writing the result into a file based on a time limit.. Is that ok or any other method should be used?

And most importantly what would be the ideal cache time ? I would like to display the latest content from the twitter but the twitter api has the request limits.. And my site has solid visitors/day..

Answer 1

The cleanest way to do this would be to use APC (Alternative PHP Cache) if it installed. This has a built in "time to live" functionality:

if (apc_exists('twitter_result')) {
    $twitter_result = apc_fetch('twitter_result');
} else {
    $twitter_result = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/...'); // or whatever your API call is
    apc_store('twitter_result', $twitter_result, 10 * 60); // store for 10 mins
}

A 10 minute timeout on the data would be my choice. This would vary depending on how frequently the feed is updated...

---

Edit If you don't have APC installed, you could do this using a very simple file:

if (file_exists('twitter_result.data')) {
    $data = unserialize(file_get_contents('twitter_result.data'));
    if ($data['timestamp'] > time() - 10 * 60) {
        $twitter_result = $data['twitter_result'];
    }
}

if (!$twitter_result) { // cache doesn't exist or is older than 10 mins
    $twitter_result = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/...'); // or whatever your API call is

    $data = array ('twitter_result' => $twitter_result, 'timestamp' => time());
    file_put_contents('twitter_result.data', serialize($data));
}