I'm (obviously from the title) using APC, Memcache, and Boost. And so far loving it. But I have a question for the more experienced in this area.
I started off using three memcache bins... default, page, and filter.
My APC memory is 256MB, and it's got 100% hit rate with 0% fragmentation. I'm thrilled with that.
Boost is chugging right along, caching more than I ever expected it to, and serving anonymous pages "BLAT" fast.
My memcache default bin has a 75% hit rate, and the filter bin has a 70% hit rate. Both very acceptable to me.
The page bin however is zero percent hit rate. Doing some research, I found clues that maybe the page bin wouldn't have any hits with Boost running. That's fine by me, it means I don't need the bin.... if I am correct.
Does having Boost running eliminate the need for the page bin?
Comments
Once you start using Boost,
Once you start using Boost, your page cache should get 0 hits. Drupal only uses page cache for anonymous users. But with Boost, these anonymous users won't even need any PHP because Apache should serve the cached HTML page directly. And so the Drupal page cache would never get used.
Yeah, assuming you have
Yeah, assuming you have "Caching mode:" set to "Disabled" on admin/settings/performance, which is nearly always the case when you use Boost, then the cache_page table and its assigned bin are going to be empty.
Thanks, thats what I
Thanks, thats what I suspected after everything I read. I just wanted to confirm it.
Aside from the default and filter caches, are there any others that are recommended to be used, assuming one has the available memory?
Don't you think it would be
Don't you think it would be faster if you serve cached pages from memcache rather than boost? It seems that Boost only takes care of anonymous pages, so if you have authenticated pages a few of them should be cached at least by memcache if it is enabled with a page cache bins no ?
There may be a limitation due to memory available.
As we have a server with 16GB of RAM, we were simply planning to use only APC for all caches with cacherouter on top. In this case, we are investigating if we still need Boost. Any thoughts?
Even if you came up with an
Even if you came up with an authcache solution to cache some pages for authenticated users, you would still want Boost on top of it. Boost is always faster than APC or Memcache, since you are totally bypassing PHP and Drupal.
HollyIT - Grab the Netbeans Drupal Development Tool at GitHub.
Boost Overhead
Boost can have significant overhead if you are doing a lot of inserts, updates, etc. In particular, it works poorly on sites with feedapi or other bulk imports. So, Boost isn't always a net benefit and can potentially overload the site.
Also, Varnish works in approximately the same way as Boost (caches whole output), but skips the Apache layer entirely. It could be a better choice for certain configurations.
Ken Winters
The other option in those
The other option in those situations is to mount your cache directory to a TMPFS or RAMDISK. It's kind of like a "poor man's Varnish" and works good in situations where you don't want to get into running Varnish. I've done this for a couple of clients as an intermediate step and where their usual server person doesn't know Varnish and wants time to learn it.
HollyIT - Grab the Netbeans Drupal Development Tool at GitHub.
Ideally you'd use a separate
Ideally you'd use a separate memcache bin for every cache_% table.
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Wow, really? I'm assuming
Wow, really? I'm assuming thats a "perfect world" scenario where you have a separate memcache server?
In my particular environment I have a single server which is hosting both my php and my database. I'm not doing anything overwhelming at far as visits go, about a million per month with 6,000 registered users and 100K nodes, but we are very module dependent because of everything we have to do with that server. Wether I like it or not, the boss has "feature-itis" and I can't scale back any further on the number of active modules I use.
So I have some real challenges in fitting everything together, but I think I'm on the right track thanks to the fine folks in this group and some great sessions at Drupalcon.
memcache in general
I've wondered about using conf_path as the memcache_key_prefix; it would be one less variable to setup when running a multi-site. Thoughts on this?