On mer, 2002-04-10 at 18:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Here's a question for everyone.
Let's say we have some portion of the page pre-calculated and cached.
Is it faster to keep that cached text *in the database*, or *on the
hard drive*?
I'm very strongly biased towards thinking that keeping it on the hard
drive is faster, and by a significant margin, but only because I've
never tested it and because I know (from long experience at Bomis) that
opening up a text file on disk and spitting it out can be *really* fast,
if the machine has enough ram such that the filesystem can cache lots of
popular files in memory.
That's a good question, and one which I haven't made any attempt to
test. As it is, we'll already be digging into the database to check
things like the user settings, page view count, last edited date, and
language links and meta-tag keywords (these last two gleaned from the
list of links during parsing, and thus left out altogether when using
the existing cache code). So it's probably not significantly slower to
grab the stored HTMLized article while we're there.
On the other hand, some of this stuff (except for the page view count
and user settings) could also be stored in a cache file and plunked
ready-made into the output along with the HTML. User settings perhaps
could be stored in a session cookie, refreshed only when the user first
visits/logs in/changes preferences, saving a little extra on database
access as well.
Worth it? No idea. But, hey, it's a suggestion.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)