Apache Caching

Posted: 2010-04-18 15:51:10 by Alasdair Keyes

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With the release of Apache 2.2, Apache's built in caching modules (mod_cache, mod_disk_cache and mod_mem_cache) became "production ready", although I'm not too sure as I'll discuss.

I implemented Apache's mod_disk_cache on a production server and it seemed to work very well, essentially, each request is hashed into a file path on your web server. This is very useful if you serve content from a remote share such as NFS, it will allow the web server to skip out all that unneeded network activity just to send the same 2KB image or CSS document 20,000 times. Compared to memory, disk is relatively slow but by further comparison, NFS or remote shares will crawl if you're handling lots of small documents.

However, I did find out that Wordpress sites have problems when mod_disk_cache is used. It seems to generate collisions and you will find that people will visit different pages in your Wordpress site but just keep on getting served the same page from the cache, often this seems to be the RSS feed for that site.

At first I thought that I'd just have to increase the path depth and size, however, even when increasing this to the maximum and flushing the cache, the problems seemed to stay. As a result, I skipped the disk cache and stuck with mod_mem_cache.

Obviously memory is much much faster than disk, although much less abundant, a modern server usually won't arrive with less than a 100GB disk but unless you spend serious cash, you won't have more than 8-16GB RAM. After implementing mod_mem_cache the problems with wordpress disappeared, the only thing I can think of is that either mod_mem_cache wasn't caching the requests and they all went to the data store... or Apache's disk cache implementation didn't have enough path size/depth to correctly stop collisions whereas it's memory hashing didn't have the same path limitations so was able to succesfully handle the request.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to view the requests stored in memory. When disk cache is being used you can look through the hashed locations on the filesystem /var/myapachecache/abc/def/123/345/.... but no such help when you're just using memory caching.

Anyway, long story short, memory caching works wonders and depending on your site. Disk caching might work wonders too, but if you seem to get collisions, just ditch it.

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