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I need help find the right caching solution for a clients site. Current site is centoOS, php, mysql, apache using smarty templates (i know they suck but it as built by someone else). The current models/methods use fairly good OO structure but there are WAY to many queries being done for some of the simple page functions. I'm looking try find some sort of caching solution but i'm a noob when it comes to this and don't know what is available that would fit the current site setup.

It is an auction type site with say 10 auctions displayed on one page at one time -- the time and current bid on each auction being updated via an ajax call returning json every 1 second (it's a penny auction site like beezid.com so updates every second are necessary). As you can see, if the site gets any sort of traffic the number of simultaneous requests could be huge. Obviously this data changes every second because the json data returned has the updated time left in the auction, and possibly updated bid amounts and bid users for each auction.

What i want is the ability to cache certain pages for a given amount of time or based on other changed variable. For example, memory caching the page that displays 10 auctions and only updating that cache copy when one of the auctions ends. Or even the script above that returns json string data every second. If i was able to cache the first request to this page in memory, serve the following requests from memory and then re-cache it again after 1 second, that could potentially reduce the serverload a lot. But i don't know if this is even possible or if the overhead of doing something like this outweights any request load savings.

I looked into xcache some but i couldn't find a way that i could set a particular cache time on a specific page or based on other variables?!? Maybe i'm missed something, but does anyone have a recommendation on a caching scheme that would work for these requirements?

Mucho thanks for any input you might have...

Michael
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    Xcache is an opcode cache. Opcode is the output of the PHP Interpreter's first pass over your code. The opcode is the code that actually gets run on the interpreter. Opcode caching will not help you with caching the results of your code, only your code itself. – Dan Grossman Feb 09 '11 at 06:12
  • Xcache can also store variable data, using the [XCacheApi](http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/XcacheApi), it's not just an opcode cache. – wimvds Feb 09 '11 at 08:39
  • @Dan - guess i was confused as to what the opcode cache did -- that would still probably help speed up processing time. And after looking at the xcacheapi (@wimvds), which looks interesteing and possibly a solution maybe i'll install and see how it works out. Thanks for your help! – Michael Feb 09 '11 at 15:47

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Cacheing can be done using many methods. Memcached springs to mind as being suited to your task. but if the site is ultra busy you may run out of ram.

When I do caching I often use a simple file cache, while it does involve at least one stat call to determine the freshness of the cached content it is still fast and marginally better than calling a sql server.

If you must call a sql server then it may pay to use a memory(heap) table to store much of the precomputed data. this technique is no more efficient than memcached, probably less so but saves you installing memcached.

DC

DeveloperChris
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  • I'll look into the memory table. Is memcached a bear to install? Btw, the server has 4 gigs of memory - and right now it's only using about 250MB of that so i don't thing memory would be an issue. – Michael Feb 09 '11 at 15:52
  • memcached is fairly simple from what I understand. as long as you have access to the machine. – DeveloperChris Feb 09 '11 at 23:44
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Zend_Cache can do what you want, and a lot more. It supports a lot of backends, including xcache and memcache, and allows you to cache data, full pages, partial pages, and well, just about anything you can imagine :p.

And in case you are wondering : you can use the Zend_Cache component by itself, you don't have to use the complete Zend framework for your application.

wimvds
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  • Thanks for the info. I'll look deeper zend_cache, i was under the impression that the whole framework would need to be included. – Michael Feb 09 '11 at 15:54