Hellp With Apc

Good afternoon friends programmers …

I’m having a little trouble understanding how APC function in an application. As I understand it, the APC is a caching system right?

But I can handle this cache?

For example … I want to load a menu with categories and subcategories. But I want to show only the categories and subcategories that have products registered. Since the result of this query stored in cache, this cache would only update when there are any changes in the table category / subcategory / product?

There is the possibility of developing a routine test with cache and without cache to see the performance difference?

If anyone can help, thanks in advance!