[development] Object caching

[Dries Buytaert]

On 17 Jul 2006, at 01:51, Moshe Weitzman wrote:
>> There was interest in having it and then it seems the feeling was  
>> it's complex.  the Caching API allows modules to implement a  
>> cache.  However, the real benefit of file based caching is 1) Use  
>> lightweight webservers threads to serve files 2) Don't need to  
>> bootstrap Drupal 3) Don't need an expensive MySQL thread.
>> Keep asking for it and it's more likely to get in since the code  
>> is available to be patched against head.
>
> the consensus was that we would make core flexible enough such that  
> this functionality can grow in Contrib for a while. At this point,  
> I think effort is best expended in changing this code from a patch  
> and into a Contrib cache.inc.

Plus, the file caching didn't yield a significant performance  
improvement (at least not on my setup) unless the "fast path" option  
was enabled.  The "fast path" option makes for a more lightweight  
bootstrap process.  It has been committed to CVS HEAD, but is now  
called "early page cache" (grep for  
DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_EARLY_PAGE_CACHE).  The thing with the "fast path"  
or the "earl page cache" is that it is not specific to file caching.   
You probably get the same benefit using a database cache.

Admittedly, file caching could be very useful in the scenario where  
the database is a significant bottleneck.  I could not reproduce such  
scenario but I'm confident such configuration exists.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/