[wp-hackers] caching doesn't work?

[David Chait]

Color me confused.  I'd think the majority of folks would be on shared 
hosting, in which case 'marginal improvement' would seem rather useless.  So 
was this really targeted at some point being implemented with 'a real 
backend' for large websites with dedi servers?  Don't get me wrong, with the 
growth of WP for really big sites, it's a needed thing -- but I'd think the 
page-caching stuff, with an order of magnitude (or two, or three if you use 
lighttpd or equiv...) improvement, would be better worth 'core dev cycles'.

I should note that I've had my own home-grown query caching in place for 
maybe a year, given that my old host had MySQL servers separate from the 
apache boxes, and I figured going to disk is (sometimes) faster than going 
across the network to another box which might not be caching well and 
hitting a db table which may or may not be fully resident (or the box might 
be under heavy loads...).  I saw some decent pageload speed increases due to 
elimination of common queries -- but I haven't yet compared my approach to 
the new 2.0 object cache (might be redundant, might be I catch extra stuff 
that I found more the culprits...).

In any case, might I suggest this conversation could blend into the 2.next 
conversation, and that wp-cache (which started as Staticize...) be 
considered for direct inclusion in the distro (given the impact it makes) 
and direct maintenance as a core element, and that the two different caching 
approaches be detailed well enough in docs/codex that people aren't confused 
why their performance drops when they upgrade to 2.0 and don't put wp-cache 
back into play? ;) ;) ;)

-d

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ryan Boren" <ryan at boren.nu>
To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 1:47 AM
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] caching doesn't work?


| Nathan Ollerenshaw wrote:
| > I thought WP_Object_Cache obviates the need for other caching  systems
| > ... but it doesn't seem to make a difference performance-wise  whether
| > it is on or off, though looking at what stats() gives you, it  seems to
| > be 'working'.
| The object cache can't compete with a full static caching system like
| wp-cache, nor is it meant to.  In my ab benchmarks, the persistent
| object cache offered a marginal performance improvement over running
| without persistent caching. The benchmarking was done on a couple of
| shared hosting setups.  On my personal servers, I saw slightly better
| performance, depending on the amount of disk caching.  The real
| advantage of the cache is that it is pluggable.  Thus you can use APC or
| memcached backends.  As for the default backend, on some hosts it simply
| doesn't buy you much.  It all depends.|