Advcache: call for benchmarks

Hi all. I've been working on a new project called Advcache (Advanced Cache) which is a package of caching patches (and a controller module) for Drupal 5. It allows you to cache many things which don't get cached normally, and is intended to increase the performance of Drupal sites, especially for authenticated users. Current caching targets include nodes, comments, taxonomy (trees, terms, vocabularies and node-term bindings), paths, search queries, and forums. Some initial primitive benchmarking with ab on my MacBook shows that this group of patches can make Drupal up to 5 times faster for authenticated users. I would love it, however, if one or more people could test these patches and do some benchmarking on different machines and different platforms. Of course, it is also helpful to have people read the code and find bugs!

Now, for the real goodie: this plays super nice with the memcache module I also recently released. The same round of primitive testing that I did showed that using advcache+memcache on my MacBook took me from 4-5 requests per second (authenticated user) to the 110-115 requests per second range. That is a similar number to what I achieve for anonymous users using aggressive caching. Using only core modules, I had around 220 database queries for the front page, and got this down to 23 queries with all of the caching patches and memcache enabled. If you're ambitious and want to try benchmarking these modules together, that would be awesome. Don't hesitate to contact me if you run into any problems setting it all up.