I'm currently using the "file" cache driver, thinking of switching to "redis" any caveats?

You'd probably be better off with varnish.

I have no experience with Varnish and I don't want to take that risk.

I had no experience with it when I set it up the first time either, but it's pretty painless. Basically it runs on port 80, instead of your webserver running on port 80.. if a requested page is in cache it's served immediately, so php, db, etc never get touched at all. If it's not in cache (the varnish cache, specifically) it passes the request through to the webserver, now running on port 8080, for example, which serves up the response, which varnish then caches.

That will always be significantly faster than any cache backend option because it's able to prevent the app from having to bootstrap at all to generate responses.

Any speed differences you find between file based and redis based caching are likely to be fairly minimal, because you still have the overhead and latency of bootstrapping the app, checking the cache, and responding. Vs. varnish which will simply respond from memory directly in usually 200ms or so. The result is that your site will load pretty much instantly. This kind of solution would also handle traffic spikes better than a different cache backend, because, again.. php wouldn't be part of the equation at all for handling many of the requests.

I use Redis on all of my sites and swear by it. I use it for Session/Cache/Queue also.

I run my own dedicated server, so I have to deploy my apps myself. The only thing I have to do for Redis is setup a queue listener via Supervisor, which is easy. Once its set up, you'll see how fast Redis is. Pulling from Redis is nearly instant! You don't have to be reserved about using it like you do with SQL queries.

Just make sure you set up an expire time on everything you cache in Laravel, unless you're persisting data.

Thanks for the responses. I'll have to take a look at varnish in my spare time... 200ms sounds good. Is there a guide I can follow to get varnish working on my forge server?

@ShutteR my file cache is currently hovering around 500mb, would this translate to 500mb in-memory storage when switching to Redis? (meaning I might need to upgrade my droplet). Also what happens when Redis runs out of memory would it use the disk?

I'm running a wiki-like set up with around 30k pages.

@james123 I don't know if file cache size == Redis cache size. It would be a helluva lot faster though, that's for sure.

Lookup how Redis works! Redis by default persists all data to your disk. When it runs out of memory, there are a few options that you can set that'll tell it what to do. It's really nice.