On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Michael Dale <mdale(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Has anyone done any scalability studies into minimal
php @readfile
script vs apache serving the file. Obviously apache will server the file
a lot faster but a question I have is at what file size does it saturate
disk reads as opposed to saturated CPU?
It will never be disk-bound unless the site is tiny and/or has too
little RAM. The files can be expected to remain in the page cache
perpetually as long as there's a constant stream of requests coming
in. If the site is tiny, performance isn't a big issue (at least not
for the site operators). If the server has so little free RAM that a
file that's being read every few minutes and is under a megabyte in
size is consistently evicted from the cache, then you have bigger
problems to worry about.