Which layer of caching does your slow app actually need?

So in general, I know there is this concept on the internet of caching things, right? And basically that means like keep a copy of it, I guess, and just serve that copy again instead of getting the real one.

But I'm going to play a little bit of a dummy here, a little bit of a devil's advocate, Joel.

And I'm going to pretend like I don't actually know much about caching.

Okay.

Because I think...

I'm going to ask you this question because it's going to lead us through an interesting cache arc, a story arc through all the tools that we have evolved, involve, available inside of Laravel.

So in general, if I were to say to you, I think I need caching.

My website is slow.

Okay.

What was the type of questions you'd ask me about first to kind of figure out why I'm even bringing that up?

I mean, I would say like what's slow that that's great.

Like, yeah.

Is it a particular page? Is it the site as a whole? Is it like this once, you know, I'm just e-commerce sites like this one product takes forever to load, but like all the other ones load fine.

Like I would definitely start like what's slow and what's the pattern for when it's slow.

Okay.

So let's

just say then that we've had a, I'm going to skip a lot of the part of the conversation just to make this a shorter podcast.

Okay.

We've went down the route.

We're going to splinter off one direction and be like, we've determined that it's just every single page is really slow.

Um, it's, it's mainly like an HTML, um, website, but it's loading stuff from the database.

Um, but every single page is really slow and, um, It's third-party resources loading that are slow.

It's just so

slow all in general.

And it's dynamic enough that we can't reasonably do like Cloudflare or something in front of it and just try to solve it that way.