[development] File caching patch for Drupal 4.6 and 4.7

[John Handelaar]

Neil Drumm 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?

a)  Squid is a bitch to install correctly without
     having logins and sessions mixed up all over the
     place (Drupal's cache-control settings are not
     designed for it and will trip Squid up)

b)  Squid's not available to anyone without a dedicated
     server

c)  Don't count out the value of removing MySQL from
     a page request.  Some of us have traffic. :)

d)  Cache-enabling is *exactly* the sort of DB write
     operation, which happens repeatedly, therefore can knock
     its table out of service when you're using MyISAM.

e)  Worse, and related to d), it's a DB problem which gets
     worse in direct relation to visitor traffic, which is
     in fact the *exact opposite* of its intended effect.


I'm sure that's not as long a list as I could come up
with if I were trying harder...


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John Handelaar

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