On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Michael Dale mdale@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.