James Andrews

I am working on a website project.  The website will have multiple domains/hosts pointing to it, and will have different themes for each domains/hosts that visit it.  I want to give the site owners as much flexibility as possible with their layouts so that not everyone can have their own look.  One problem that I see with giving them flexibility to change things is most of those things get stored in a database, and this is well and good but once the site starts to ramp up I expect there will be huge draws on server resources and database calls.  Enter caching.  I will admit I don’t have any experience writing a caching application.  Symfony does it for you so Givvy has it, but not through my hands.  Digibug had os-commerce, but I don’t think it cached anything really.  Which explains why  the CM Photocenter has so many performance issues. After researching php caching I can see 100 ways we could have increased performance on that site, and the same on the Digibug.

So I am researching, and everything I’ve read seems to be about the same, so now I am kind of at the point of “where and when to cache”. Not everything is going to be cache-able, but more importantly because I’ll have multiple sites pointing to the same server, I need a caching schema that caches based on the host that is being requested. This is my plan of action.

1. Create a cached configuration file. This needs contain the basic information needed to connect to the database, and all the configuration items for that particular sites.
2. Create cached items that are common on all pages. This includes page headers and footers. In different states
3. Create cached items that won’t be updated often. Blog information. Gallery lists/thumbnail views. Event list pages
4. Come up with a plan so that when something is updated in the database it regenerates the cache files, so the end user is not waiting.

I think it will help keep the big bad resource monsters at bay, allows some great customization abilities, and give me a good way to grow the site, I just need to think it through a bit more, decide which cache library I am going to use (or if I am going to roll my own), and figure out how to implement it. Lots of fun ahead. I have some ideas, and an entire weekend to play around with them :-p