Serverside cache

[Anon]

I need to speed up loading of "as-good-as-static" php-pages. These php-scripts fetches some data from a database and formats it. The formatting and fetching part is very slow, though, so I'd thought I'd speed it up by saving the allready formatted page in some cachelike system on the server. The content only renewd every 1000th, os something, times someones visites the site. The cache could then be updated only as the content is renewed.

Does this in some way make sense to you guys?
In that case, I'd like to knw how this could be accomplished.

Thanks in advance,
Svein Halvor Halvorsen

[[deleted]]

Id look at speeding up the database fetching process rather than thinking up a complex system to workaround the slow database.

[yelvington]

There are several things you can consider.

You can rewrite your code to cache complete page images in the file system. If the cached page image exists, serve it, else create it, cache it, and serve it.

A variation of that is to write a 404 handler that examines the URL for clues as to how to build a page, then builds it and caches it. In that scenario, you would be serving HTML and not PHP. I posted an example of that some months ago.

You can apply either of these approaches to cache components that have been retrieved from the database, rather than complete pages.

And you can look at two tools that cache, in memory, compiled images of PHP scripts: Zend Cache (commercial) at http://www.zend.com/ and Alternative PHP Cache (free) at http://apc.communityconnect.com/.

[Anon]

Agreed, but the ting is that it is not the fetching process itself, that takes time, it is the preperation of the data.

You see, the data in this case, is messages contributed by users to a web-based forum. All messages is dispalyed in one page, newwest on top. But before these messages is outputted on the page, the message is, if it is between 6 and 22 hours, censored. Scanned for "no-words". These words are replaced by a "<font color='red'>beeeep</font>".
And before all messages can be displayed, these has to be scanned by the family-filter (which takes time).

Svein

[sveinhal]

Forget it.

I think I'd rather just save two versions of each message. One censored and another not.
Then each message just has to be passed through the censorship-function one time; at creation. Then I'll code a update-script that goes though all the messages in the database and recensors it. In case I'd like to append words on the no-list.

Svein Halvor