Caching can be used to make reading from expensive or slow resources faster, by maintaining a second copy of the required data in a faster or closer storage system.
There are 5 built-in caching engines supported by CakePHP :
FileEngine
: Uses simple files to store content. Poor performance, but good for storing large objects, or things that are not IO sensitive.
ApcEngine
: Uses the APC object cache, one of the fastest caching engines.
MemcacheEngine
: Uses the PECL::Memcache extension and Memcached for storage. Fast reads/writes, and benefits from memcache being distributed.
XcacheEngine
: Uses the Xcache extension, an alternative to APC.
WincacheEngine
: Uses Windows Cache Extension for PHP. Supports wincache 1.1.0 and higher.