Drupal 8 brings with it a massive amount of caching options, and an updated cache system. These changes place a lot of power in the hands of developers, but with this power comes a wealth of choice. Having so many choices can sometimes be counterproductive. When trying to decide where is the best location for a specific cache bin, things can get tricky. During the development of an application that can receive hundreds of form submissions per minute, we ran into some of these tricky situations.

Looking at some of the options available to us: Database, APCu, Chainedfast, Opcode, Redis, Memcahced we realised we would have to brute force this problem to get the optimum results. Some of what we learned has been counterintuitive to our previous understandings, and we feel that we need to share our story. Sit back and listen to some of our learnings so that you might not have to go through the same process.