Surprising mod_mcpage finding

Apparently I'll be able to get the patch ready sooner than I expected. I had been experimenting with using localmemcache's C API to store pages in the fast local cache, assuming that it would be faster than using a local instance of memcached running on the server, and that I'd just have to add expiration and LRU removal to localmemcache (not the smallest task, but certainly quite doable).

After converting mod_mcpage to use the binary protocol, I got a bit of a speed boost, so that mod_mcpage serves stuff up about as quickly as it lighttpd serves a static file (sometimes a few microseconds faster, sometimes a few microseconds slower). Not too shabby.

I plunked the normal localmemcache in, replacing the memcached stuff for the local memcached with it, and got a very surprising result -- the speed was virtually the same, maybe a few microseconds faster. This is obviously rather unexpected.

As it stands, then, it's easier to just run the local memcached instance for the fast local cache rather than screw around with localmemcache here and make people install yet another library.

 
comments powered by Disqus