handyman - 17 May 2011 02:27 PM

I think most apache and ‘nix setups automatically cache php and even mysql (has built in cache) ...at least that is what my admin told me!  This requires a decent amount of RAM, but memory is cheap these days.

MySQL, yes, to some degree. But that still means that the request needs to go through PHP and then to MySQL..

What I’m talking about is full page caching, meaning that you webserver will have the page ready without even invoking PHP. This is the only way to get a truly fast site, and I highly doubt that Apache gives you anything like that automatically (only used NGinx and Lighttpd).

Has there been any tests to use Memcached for EE cache storage instead of files? Would help clustering at least..

Since most of my use if forums which are updated every few seconds, the cache thing does not really work too well - that is, the full page cache. But the server still caches mysql stuff and a lot of other stuff (maybe js files, images, etc.) through mysql and apache.

As to memcache, my ISP had asked me about that and I posted a note to the EL staff…they said EE was not compatible…...for whatever reason(s).

Some add-ons use full page caching as you mention - solspace, for instance:
http://www.solspace.com/software/tag/caching

I think this works great for stuff that does not change too often - but with true dynamic serving, such as a forum with entries every few seconds, much of this does not apply. Solspace said none of their products, for instance, would work with the forum.

It’s a funny thing - static was the name of the game on the web from day one….and now, finally, when we get around to having lots of dynamic info, people want to go back to static! I agree it’s a good thing for static content…....but much on the web is not static.

I don’t really consider EE to be a forum.. Sure, it has a forum component which I tried, but settled for another solution. Of course a forum is hard to cache, but that has nothing to do with EE..

Doing very aggressive full page caching for a “normal” site is not that hard. We are using Disqus which means that comments are loaded asynchronus via JS. The dynamic parts that are left on the page (for example latest comments, latest forum posts and so on) are generated on the server every 20 seconds, stored in Memcached, then served from NGinx talking directly to Memcached to the page via Ajax. The drawback is that the caching in NGinx doesn’t “talk” to EE, so when there’s a new article the cache will remain for 10 minutes for example. Not a huge deal for our site, but making a ping between the systems wouldn’t be that hard.

The reason people want to “go back to static” is the pure speed. Serving up 10k pages/s is not interesting for us, but the response time is something else.

Greg mentioned you will be creating a new section in the User guide for these kinds of tips.

Any update on that?