Search

In my never-ending quest for greater Drupal Glory, I've been spending the past year boning up on the various ways to improve site performance and address issues of scalability. Today, doing some noodling with Amazon EC2 instances (and remaining unconvinced about their raw performance as potential master database servers) I had a thought:

What would it take to extend the static node cache in node_load() beyond the individual drupal bootstrap?

Like just about everyone else, I've been loving how much memcached helps speed site performance. It simply rocks, and everyone looking to reduce server load and speed page responses should be looking into it. One of the better things about it is that it can store and return data objects natively, meaning not only are you letting PHP pull something out of a lightning-fast memory cloud, you also don't incur the CPU overhead of having to unserialize() a string into an object or array.

This let me to my thought. If you want a massively scalable interactive drupal site, you need ready access to tons of nodes. Inevitably you will hit the wall with logged-in requests for these from your database. But what if we were able to take the performance boost we get from node_load()'s static cache, and make it work persistently across an entire site, rather than just for one pageload?

Unlike a lot of the conversations here, my question is not about a single high-traffic site, but dozens of small to medium traffic sites. I run a small web design company which hosts approx. 50 low-traffic sites on a single dedicated server. We are working to increase this to 100+ in the next year. Some are Drupal 5, but most are Drupal 6. Most sites are also on multi-site configurations, with around 6 different Drupal instances running the 50 sites.

Authcache offers page caching for logged-in authenticated users. This allows Drupal to load pages in 1-2 milliseconds and take the load off the the database & processor. Please help test this module (the site I was creating this for got axed, but I continued development on this module). Feedback & patches are welcome. This module can be used for anonymous users (it's faster than Drupal core since the database won't be hit), supports the statistics module, and can cache blocks of user-customized content.

Many thanks to Steve Rude for his work on the Cache Router module, which Authcache uses as its caching system.

This is how it works:

Hello Everyone,

I have a website with 100k Visitors/Day , I am a newbie in Php and Servers, when a downtime occurs managed hosting guy was resetting the server and I was optimizing the databases and I was optimizing the DB everyday and I was fine.

But this week site became to crash twice a day. And Reboot/optimize only works for 5-6 hrs and it crashes again. My hosting guy said it is caused by cache_page table in mySQL and it gives ~300MiB overhead in 2hrs after mysql optimization. And he said its a wrong method to keep cache in database it causes this errors.