What is database caching?
Whenever your website needs to load a page, it usually queries the database to fetch posts, settings, or user information. That’s fast, but not always fast enough. If the same queries are repeated over and over, performance suffers.
That’s where database caching comes in. By storing the results of frequent queries in memory, your site can skip the database round-trip and deliver the content instantly. We use Redis, a high-performance in-memory data store, because it’s proven to handle heavy workloads with lightning speed.
Didn’t you already have database caching?
Yes. We’ve been running Redis for years. Until now, Redis was configured as a global service, meaning every website on the server shared the same caching pool over a TCP connection. This setup was effective, but it wasn’t perfect.
Shared caching can create unnecessary overhead, and using TCP sockets adds a small but measurable delay. For a platform obsessed with squeezing every millisecond of performance, that wasn’t good enough.
Per-User Redis
That’s why we’re excited to roll out per-user Redis caching. Instead of a single shared service, each user now gets their own dedicated Redis process.
This change brings two major improvements:
- Privacy: Each site has its own cache, isolated from everyone else.
- Performance: Instead of communicating over TCP, the cache connects through a local UNIX socket. That makes it significantly faster.
Of course, running multiple Redis processes does use more memory. But thanks to our new enterprise servers with 256 GB of RAM, we’re able to dedicate those resources to what matters most, your site’s speed and reliability.
How does this work?
To take advantage of per-user Redis caching, you’ll need to make sure the LSCache plugin is active on your site. From there, simply grab the UNIX socket path provided in your control panel and drop it into your configuration, here is how to do it
Locate Redis on the Database section on your hosting control panel and open it
Now copy the folder inside () without those parenthesis, in this case it should be: /home/bigframedigital/.redis/redis.sock
This folder will change according to the username assigned in your account, this is just an example.
Now go into the Litespeed Cache plugin -> Cache -> Object
Enable Redis and paste the folder that you just copied from the control panel, hit save. If connection Test says “Passed” Redis has been enabled on your website.
You can add all your websites to your private Redis Caching, since they all have different database ids, they won’t conflict between each other they will all enjoy your private database caching.
Some drawbacks
There’s one important change: because of the new model, we had to disable the old global Redis service. That means you’ll need to update your site manually to start using the per-user socket.
Not comfortable doing it yourself? No problem. Just reach out to us—we’ll be happy to set it up for you.
Summary
Per-user Redis caching is a big step forward in performance and privacy:
- Faster queries through UNIX sockets
- Private, isolated caching per website
- Optimized for our high-memory servers
This new system is already available on our New York and Dallas servers. It will be rolled out to Los Angeles soon, and all new servers will have it enabled by default, replacing the older global method.
Faster, safer, smarter—this is database caching, evolved.