So I switched over from using Laravel's eager loading to checking the cache first before hitting the db. I've got it to the point where it's only doing 8 queries to the database per request vs the 100+ queries it was using before.
However, the response time is now slower than it was before. Per this stackoverflow question, Laravel Caching with Redis is very slow, it seems that using the cache facade is a lot slower than calling redis/memcached directly.
Why is the cache facade slower than calling the cache directly? Should I switch over to using redis/memcached directly? What can I do to improve the performance of my application while still using the cache facade, if possible?
Leveraging caching as much as possible and minimizing the number of queries to the DB is a requirement for this project I'm working on.
Another thing to note is that I'm using both memcached and redis for the cache drivers, as there are some things that are stored in memcached that are shared between the services I'm writing and the old services, and there are items that are exclusive to the services I'm writing which I can use Redis for instead.
