Caching Dynamic Pages Help.

Rodney_H_

Hi, all.

I have spent the weekend reading articles about how to creat cached pages
for your web application to increase speed and reduce cpu/server load.

However, I honestly don't know what is the best/most current technique
being employed. Most of the articles I read were several years old, including
one on ZEND that was almost five years old.

So, can anyone tell me, briefly, what they are doing NOW, or point me to a
recent article?

Thanks for your help and consideration.

Jason_Batten

Maybe this will help... found via google http://www.phpguru.org/static/Caching.html

planetsim

Basically my Cache System is an extension on the Template System. Its rather small as it only really acts as an interface for logic to presentation and nothing more. The Cache class is always initiated and before any page building or logic is performed a key for the page is made usually an md5 hash of the URL. It than checks a cache directory if the file exists and if it does how old it is. If its older than 'x' amount the we go and recreate the page and than store the updated cache file. The logic than of this if its not older than 'x' we simply open the cached file and send it to the user that requested the page.

Not sure this helps any as I haven't given any code examples but I hope I explained the basic logic behind it can help you develop your own.

Rodney_H_

planetsim wrote:
Basically my Cache System is an extension on the Template System. Its rather small as it only really acts as an interface for logic to presentation and nothing more. The Cache class is always initiated and before any page building or logic is performed a key for the page is made usually an md5 hash of the URL. It than checks a cache directory if the file exists and if it does how old it is. If its older than 'x' amount the we go and recreate the page and than store the updated cache file. The logic than of this if its not older than 'x' we simply open the cached file and send it to the user that requested the page.

Not sure this helps any as I haven't given any code examples but I hope I explained the basic logic behind it can help you develop your own.

Yes, I understand and would like if you would consider sharing your code with me/us?

Jason, I did read that briefly, but noticed it was for PHP5, and we are still running 4 on our servers, UGH! (but thanks a million, mate!)

planetsim

Sorry dont have code on me at the moment (currently at work), but this is relatively similar to how mine works http://www.massassi.com/php/articles/template_engines/.

Rodney_H_

Thanks very much, Planetism.

MarkR

I've done several experiments with Apache's caching functions (Available in "stable" form since Apache 2.2). These are pretty powerful but it's nontrivial to set up.

Basically the web server behaves as if it had a caching reverse proxy in front of it (even though it does not) and takes notice of the Expires:, Cache-control:, Vary: headers etc.

The trick then is to be able to have the same headers have the right effect upon the browser.

Serving pages from the Apache memory cache is extremely quick.

What specific performance problem are you having? Perhaps there is an easier solution.

Mark