Input on caching methods?

caching works really well for concurrent users - or a bunch of people hitting the same page (and the database) at the same time. so even if your page content changes constantly - if you set the cache time for just 5 minutes - you are still limiting the database calls to once every 5 minutes for that page, versus hundreds of calls per second if its very popular. even a cache time of 1 minute would still greatly speed up the response time.

codeigniter by default is going to cache the entire page. so if your content is changing every few seconds then you might need to cache different parts of the page. otherwise its a matter of setting the time appropriately. i'm a huge fan of codeigniter caching because its so easy, and it really makes a difference in the response time of the page.