Apache, PHP caching

Question

A have setup an internal proxy kind of thing using Curl and PHP. The setup is like this:

The proxy server is a rather cheap VPS (which has slow disk i/o at times). All requests to this server are handled by a single index.php script. The index.php fetches data from another, fast server and displays to the user.

The data transfer between the two servers is very fast and the bottleneck is only the disk i/o on the proxy server. Since there is only one index.php - I want to know

1) How do I ensure that index.php is permanently "cahced" in Apache on the proxy server? (Googling for php cache, I found many custom solutions that will cache the "data" output by php I want to know if there are any pre-build modules in apache that will cache the php-script itself?).

2) Is the data fetched from the backend server alway in the RAM/cache on the proxy server? (assuming there is enough memory)

3) Does apache read any config files or other files from disk when handling requests?

4) Does apache wait for logs to be written to disk before serving the content - if so I will disable logging on the proxy server (or is there way to ensure content is first served without waiting for logs to be written).?

Basically, I want to eliminate disk i/o all together on the 'proxy' server.

Thanks,

JP

Wow. I got 3 answers and all useful :). Thanks everyone. – Nov 15 '10 at 15:30 — , Nov 15 '10 at 15:30

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

1) Install APC (http://pecl.php.net/apc), this will compile your PHP script once and keep it in shared memory for the lifetime of the webserver process (or a given TTL).

2) If your script fetches data and does not cache/store it on the filesystem, it will be in RAM, yes. But only for the duration of the request. PHP uses a 'share-nothing' strategy which means -all- memory is released after a request. If you do cache data on the filesystem, consider using memcached (http://memcached.org/) instead to bypass file i/o.

3) If you have .htaccess support activated, Apache will search for those in each path leading to your php file. See Why can't I disable .htaccess in Apache? for more info.

4) Not 100% sure, but it probably does wait.

Thanks! Your answer is so precise, and now I am confident I am on right track to solve my problem :) — , Nov 15 '10 at 15:43

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 15 '10 at 07:45

3

Why not use something like Varnish which is explicitly built for this type of task and does not carry the overhead of Apache?

answered Nov 15 '10 at 07:45

Tom

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Isn't Varnish only for static HTTP requests? Doesn't seem like it works for PHP. – Pacerier Nov 21 '17 at 23:05

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 15 '10 at 08:10

0

I would recommend "tinyproxy" for this puprose. Does everything you want very efficeintly.

answered Nov 15 '10 at 08:10

James Anderson

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Apache, PHP caching

3 Answers3