Posted by Amazon on August 18, 2007 at 1:39am
A file-based caching mechanism for serving up cached Drupal pages instead of using the database 'cache' table. This approach is generally faster since the web server doesn't need to initialize a database connection and crunch through a bunch of PHP files for an anonymous user hit.
This is in release candidate state.
Comments
vs. memcache
Since this does a lot of disk i/o, does this have any benefits over memcache? Or, is this just an alternative if you don't have the hardware for memcache?
Btw, has anyone thought
Btw, has anyone thought about a hybrid approach? memcache for the most frequently used data, filecache for less frequently used? For very large sites, it seems more sensible to cache most of the HTML out to disk rather than storing it all in memory.
memcache vs. fastpath file cache
For d.o, we are already using memcache. I am not sure if it is setup with the db backup option or without that. Perhaps the former.
If it is setup without the db backup option, then that is as fast as you can get (everything in memory, no disk access at all).
If it is setup with the db backup option, then there is still overhead in updating the cache tables.
For RAM starved setups, fastpath may be a better option, since a request that is in cache is handled via Apache without neither Drupal nor the database being involved.
One possible area for improvement is caching for authenticated users, which the advcache module is pursuing.
Drupal development and consulting 2bits.com
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i wish
thats true of boost but not fastpath. fastpath still bootstraps a bit and then serves through php a file that is found on filesystem. fastpath is still great, but not quite as great as you describe.
i am using boost module for
i am using boost module for my multisite setup and its great
We had to disable boost
Back when we were on 4.7 we had to disable boost because it somehow got some bad data and was looking for a file that didn't exist. Because of the sheer volume of traffic we were receiving at the time it was less intensive on our server to use the standard drupal cache than for apache to try and and serve the non-existent file over and over again.
Nathan