Web caching

[rhofland at fastdial.net (Randall Hofland)]

My curiousity is piqued: can one use a RAMdisk to run a dedicated Apache
cache assuming the memory is available or is it just best to use the fastest
disk possible, perhaps a mirrored RAID set?

"Mark J. Dulcey" wrote:

> Ron Peterson wrote:
> >
> > I'm curious.  Does Apache cache static web content in memory?  I.E. - if
> > I request a static page, does Apache store that page in memory for some
> > period of time, in case someone else asks for it?  Or does Apache fetch
> > the page from disk each and every time?  If it is cached, then for how
> > long?  Is there a cache timeout parameter?
>
> I believe that Apache simply fetches the file from disk each time. Of
> course, the underlying operating system is likely to cache the file.
> It's not clear that adding a cache to Apache would be better than
> letting the OS handle it; the likely result would be to have Apache
> cache too little (slowing it down) or too much (slowing other
> applications down).
>
> > Taking this a step further, would PHP perhaps do the same thing?
> > Obviously dynamic content, like database data, would need to be
> > requeried, but the php files themselves could be loaded every "x" number
> > of minutes or something.
>
> I know that mod_perl caches loaded code, so that it doesn't have to
> reload and recompile it. That's a much more expensive operation than
> simply fetching a file from disk, so an internal cache is the right
> thing here. I don't know what PHP does.
>
> This, of course, can be awkward in a development environment - your code
> changes don't take effect right away. I suppose the solution is not to
> run your in-development scripts under mod_perl unless you have to (if
> they're depending on looking at some Apache internals, for example).
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