Re: using APC as content-cache?

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Interesting idea. Although it seems like it could be done almost completely in user-space, couldn't it? Perhaps something like this wrapper set as your auto_prepend?

This is one of the caching approaches we've taken at fotopic to handle image manipulation.

Would be interesting to see the performance numbers on this approach.

I don't have any stats to hand, but I will say that you take a slight (fairly obvious) I/O hit. Using either a SCSI disk or a sata/sataII disk with TCQ does seem to negate most of this increased I/O however, especailly in high-load situations.

Then again, for full content-caching like this, a 404 handler which saves a static version of the content plus a cron job that periodically removes files older than 30 minutes might be even more effective. I would think that something like the above would be most effective when used in a partial page caching context.

The only thing to look out for here is that a cron job running through a directory of cached files just doing rm will hit a max file number limit pretty quickly depending on the application. It's safer to do a "find | xargs rm" as the cronjob and just run that every 5 minutes or so over the cachefile directory.