Welcome to Geeklog, Anonymous Saturday, April 05 2025 @ 01:54 am EDT

Geeklog Forums

Weather to cache or not

Post New Reply

Author:

Mood:

Code

Font Color Font Size Close Tags

Forum BBCode Help

BBCode	Effect
[b]bolded text[/b]	bolded text
[i]italicized text[/i]	italicized text
[u]underlined text[/u]	underlined text
[s]strikethrough text[/s]	strikethrough text
[img]http://www.site.com/forum/images/forum.png[/img] OR [img h=65 w=50]http://www.site.com/forum/images/forum.png[/img]
[url=https://www.geeklog.net]Geeklog[/url]	Geeklog
[quote]quoted text[/quote]	To quote: quoted text
[size=15]Your Text[/size] "12" is usually standard on message boards. Usually measured in pixels (px).	Your Text
[color=red]Red Text[/color] OR [color=#FF0000]Red Text[/color] Can use many different color names or hex codes.	Red Text
[list] []List item 1 []List item 2 [/list] OR [list=1] []List item 1 []List item 2 [/list]	List item 1 List item 2 List item 1 List item 2
[code]monospaced text[/code]	monospaced text
[code=XYX]formatted code[/code] Where XYZ can be any of the following: c css html4strict java javascript jquery perl php plain python SQL and many more...	formatted code
To enter a backslash (\) in your post, use \\\\	\

Subject

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: squatty[/u][p]Yes and no...[p]

The down side to not caching is slower performance.  There is a lot of overhead associated with connecting to MSNBC for every page request...especially on the front view of your Geeklog site.  The hit is not as bad on the details page because the page is not requested as often.  Bottom line, the caching is in place to make the performance of your site better!  This of course comes with the possibility of users seeing “stale content”[/p][p]

Here's how the caching works:[/p][p]

1)  [b][i]Create a cache file per each registered user[/i][/b] - My caching mechanism creates a cache file per each user and more importantly per each users content preference.  This guarantees that every user will ONLY see his/her content preferences.  If you look in the /path/to/Geeklog/public_html/blockname/cache/ directory, you will see multiple *.cache file names.  There is a cache file per each user id.
[/p][p]
The code for the registered user cache is listed below.  This sample is taken from my news block (display_news.php):
[/p][p]

if (($_USER['uid'] > 0)) {

$cache_file = $_CONF['path_html'] . '/news/cache/news-uid' . $_USER['uid'] .'.cache';	
	$time	= split(" ", microtime());
	srand((double)microtime()*1000000); 
	$cache_time_rnd = 100000 - rand(0, 600);

if ( (!(file_exists($cache_file))) || 
	     ((filectime($cache_file) + $cache_time - $time[1]) + $cache_time_rnd 
	     (!(filesize($cache_file))) ) {
		$fpwrite = fopen($cache_file, 'w'); 
		if(!$fpwrite) {
			echo "The system fail to write files. Please check your cache/ directory CHMOD";
			return; 
		}
		$boxtitle = get_from_msnbc($location, $code); 
		fputs($fpwrite, "$boxtitle");
		fclose($fpwrite); 
	} else {
		if (file_exists($cache_file)) {
			$wfread	= fopen($cache_file, 'r'); 
			$boxtitle .= fread($wfread,filesize($cache_file)); 
			fclose($wfread); 
		}
	}
	
	}
[/p][p]

[b]Note[/b]:  You can decrease or increase or decrease the “life” of the cach by changing the value in this line [b]$cache_time_rnd = 100000 - rand(0, 600)[/b].  Set the $cach_time_rnd = 100 or 300….ect.[/p][p]

2)  [b][i]Create a global cache for anonymous users[/i][/b] - This reduces the overhead associated with loading the home page.  In addition, it prevents anonymous users from flushing the cache of registered users.

[/p][p]
The code for the anonymous user cache is listed below.  This sample is taken from my news block (display_news.php):
[/p][p]

if (!($_USER['uid'] > 1)) {

$cache_file = $_CONF['path_html'] . '/news /cache/news.cache'; 
	$time	= split(" ", microtime());
	srand((double)microtime()*1000000); 
	$cache_time_rnd = 100000 - rand(0, 600);

[/p][p]3) [b][i]Create crons to purge old cache[/i][/b] - This is a recent addition, and is NOT detailed in the PHP block downloads.  I recently came to the conclusion that on my site (squatty.com) I need to set extremely HIGH caching timeouts in the random seed.  This results in a tremendously stellar cache hit ration (about 90%)!  The obvious problem with this approach is that content becomes stale.  The fix for stale content is to purge cache at regular intervals.  For example, I run a cron every 20 minutes to purge all stock cache files.  This way I can get updated quotes every 20 minutes.  For more information on my crons click <a href="http://www.squatty.com/article.php?story=20020519203734469" target="new">here</a>.[/p][p]

4)  [b][i]Delete and re-create user cache on updates[/i][/b] - I recently added logic to all the admin.php pages to delete the cache on updates/deletes of content personalization.  The cache is re-created upon the next request of the bock.

[/p][p]For example, when a user changes his/her news feed, I run the following:[/p][p]
 
// Delete users existing cache file
$news_cache = 'news-uid'. $_USER['uid'] .'.cache'; 
	
$command = "rm /path/to/geeklog/public_html/news/cache/$news_cache";
exec($command);
	
[/p][/p][/QUOTE]

Options:

HTML Mode

Geeklog Forums

Search

Resources

About

Getting started

Support

Development

Topics

User Functions

What's New

Articles last 4 weeks

Comments last 4 weeks

Pages last 4 weeks

Links last 4 weeks

Downloads last 4 weeks