[development] Static Page Caching

[Mike Gifford]

On 9-Jan-06, at 4:22 PM, Moshe Weitzman wrote:
> http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/jeremy/ 
> filecache/?hideattic=0
> would be great if you reimplemented this in modern drupal and  
> submitted for core review.

Like many enhancements to Drupal, having them would be great.   
However, I would really like to know if this is seen as a general  
need in this community or not.

I know it could go a long ways to reducing server loads, but would  
people use it?  More importantly, would there be enough people  
interested in this to develop a reverse bounty to see that it gets  
implemented properly?

I'm not sure at this point that I've got the client base to fund all  
of this development internally.  We're building some requirements  
now, so will have a better sense of it fairly soon.

Pages like this are very useful:
	http://drupal.org/node/2601

But it still isn't going to give you the snappy response that you'd  
get from a drupal page that has been cached as a static html page.  A  
program like jpcache (http://www.jpcache.com/), would be a bit slower  
than a static page because apache would have to load php, and then  
load the cached file (from a file or db), however it would still use  
a fraction of the resources that a drupal site would.

The only reference to jpcache in drupal.org is:
	http://drupal.org/node/12169

There are a lot of issues to be considered with static page caching  
and I'm not sure how (or if) it is possible to accommodate multi-site  
installs.  Having a few folks contributing ideas, concerns,  
limitations would be great.

Mike

> Mike Gifford wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> We've worked with jpcache in the past to produce static page  
>> caching  for dynamic sites.  We'd like to see the ability to  
>> create and edit  pages with drupal that get saved as good old  
>> fashioned html files.
>> Perhaps this would happen on a daily basis, perhaps only under  
>> severe  load, perhaps only for paths with a .html extension,  
>> however not all  drupal content needs to be loaded from drupal all  
>> of the time.   Throttle is nice.  The page caching is a good step  
>> in the right  direction too..  But I'd like to cache an entire  
>> page so that php  isn't even loaded at all to deliver the page.
>> So, I'd just like to know what attempts have been done to do this  
>> in  the past (if any), and what problems they had (so that  
>> hopefully we  don't repeat the same ones).
>> We've investigated this for other CMS's, but not for Drupal.
--
Mike Gifford, OpenConcept Consulting
Free Software for Social Change -> http://openconcept.ca
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