On Tue, 02 May 2006 02:53:20 -0700 Neil Drumm <drumm@delocalizedham.com> wrote:
Kieran Lal wrote:
Hello, we have updated the file caching patches for 4.6 and 4.7. This work was funded by http://goodstorm.com and http://ondemand- network.com. It was developed by Jeremy Andrews for CivicSpace.
File caching for Drupal 4.6 http://drupal.org/node/61227 File caching for Drupal 4.7 http://drupal.org/node/45414
We will try to get this in Drupal 4.8 now that it has opened up. Please test and respond to the appropriate issues.
In my experience, a Squid proxy is used to do caching at this level. My understanding is that it avoids loading Apache, PHP, and MySQL when not necessary. How is this better?
There are lots of ways you can improve the infrastructure of a website to boost the overall performance. One advantage of the file-based caching patch is that this achieves a great performance and reliability boost which can be utilized by anyone that uses Drupal, not requiring any special extra hardware or software.
This is approximately the same level of caching as Drupal's existing page cache, but anonymous pages are retrieved from the filesystem (still by PHP) rather than MySQL. This makes me wonder if we should have an API for retrieval from whatever bit storage technology a sysadmin thinks is best. Just an idea, this shouldn't hold up this particular patch.
It wouldn't really make sense to store permanent data in the filesystem instead of the database, as the types of data we are storing and the way we are retrieving it is perfect for a database. If you mean to just have an API for retrieval of the cache, the problem there is how we bootstrap Drupal. That said, the DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FILE phase could evolve to being more generic, becoming perhaps DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_CACHE and allowing for support of other types of cache too, such as a memcache. Personally, I'd like to focus on getting the file-caching aspect right first, getting that merged, and then look into expanding and improving it even further.
Looks like there is some decent support but not as much (non-paid-CivicSpace) testing.
Testing and reviews are very welcome. Cheers, -Jeremy