[development] File caching patch for Drupal 4.6 and 4.7

[Jeremy Andrews]

On Tue, 02 May 2006 02:53:20 -0700
Neil Drumm <drumm at 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