Caching system for fast page loads

**RAMMSTEIN** · 10-20-2008, 03:43 PM

Vshare need a caching system for fast page loads. This is one of the main feature that PHP script must have. Every PHP script has this feature because when you run a popular website that uses PHP and MySQL you will most likely notice that your website becomes slow when your website is at its busiest. If you've really optimized your PHP script and MySQL server, you'll probably be able squeeze some additional performance out of your website, but there comes a time when it's just too much to handle. That's where caching comes in.

If you cache frequently visited data, and this usually includes your homepage, you can drasticly reduce your website's response time. By caching data to the file system, you completely cut MySQL out of the picture, and that is usually the biggest bottleneck. Another added benefit is that it will decrease the load on your MySQL server, making it faster for data that hasn't been cached yet.

**bplex** · 10-20-2008, 04:44 PM

Uh.... not really.

While I do understand where you are coming from here, a caching system isn't what is needed (I actually do this kind of stuff for a living). You are correct in that a caching system can help to reduce server load. However the amount of performance gain you would see would be small (especially for high traffic sites), if not poorer if the caching is stored on spinning disk. Database systems such as mySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server power the majority of the largest websites on the market and they all do so efficiently and effectively. The problem that we face here with vShare is that vShare is designed for single server use. Sure, there is a multiserver section, but vShare's approach to multiserver is for file storage only. Thus, your main server has to continuously get bigger and better in order for your site to operate efficiently. Eventually, you will reach a point in which this is no longer feasible. This is usually because the biggest bottleneck on a server has nothing to do with software. Rather, it has to do with your hard drive. Most dedicated servers on the market today operate on a single hard drive (or in a RAID 1 configuration). If you are actually running on true server hardware (and not desktop hardware), your server may contain a 10K RPM drive at best (or, if you are really shelling out the dough, a 15K RPM drive). If you are using desktop based hardware, you're on a 7200 RPM drive. With setup's like these, you reach a point in which you do not have enough IOPS to handle your load. This is even more true with people who have servers with unmetered bandwidth. A person with a 100Mb unmetered line has the potential to transfer a maximum 31TB of data per month, or around 12.5MB per second. The average large size SATA hard drive can sustain around 100-150MB per second (with bursts up to 300MB per second). What this means is that approximately 1/10th of your hard drive is being used just to transfer data from the server to the person requesting the page. When you add on top of that the OS plus software plus reads/writes into/out of memory, plus database, this can fill up very quickly. This is why your largest sites out there run application clustering and load balancing (to spread the load to multiple servers) and database farms (database servers attached to high-performance SAN Arrays that have cache cards installed and are designed for high IOPS). vShare does not offer us any of these abilities.

Now, while I don't believe that vShare should go as far as to support any of that stuff as the price point isn't designed for it (although if the next version is open source, we could definitely add that in), what I do believe that vShare could and should offer us is true multiserver support in which application, CPU, process, and storage, are spread between multiple servers. Also, moving from Apache only installations to offering either Apache or Lighttpd with support for load balancing and clustering help out tremendously for load and performance.

**RAMMSTEIN** · 10-21-2008, 08:02 AM

My mistake was that at the beginning i was adding videos to the main server. now that i have more users the server is very slow :(

**bplex** · 10-21-2008, 02:59 PM

Yep, that's the downfall of vShare's setup. The problem though is that dumping the videos off to another server will not really help for performance because the viewing of the video is client-side and not server-side. What we need is the ability from vShare to offload the processes from vShare to another server via APIs. I've seen other scripts out there that do this.

**bplex** · 10-21-2008, 06:41 PM

I just found something that may be of interest to everyone who is dealing with high load and traffic. There is a PHP cache system that will help speed up your code and bring the server load down as well. You can find out more about it (along with setup instructions) at

http://www.jasonlitka.com/2006/12/20/ph ... th-xcache/

**bplex** · 10-21-2008, 07:26 PM

Update to the link above:

While Xcache works with Zend Optimizer, some people have reported problems with running Zend and Xcache at the same time. Best not to install it unless you know what you are doing. Can't wait until that 2.7 version comes out :D