New Module: Static Page Caching
EE development shop Solspace has joined forces with former EllisLab team member Paul Burdick ( now of Fiery Tea, Inc.) to develop and release a new module: Static Page Caching.
This module allows you to cache an entire page in ExpressionEngine based on its URI (the part after index.php). The page will be stored as a file on the server and your Site’s .htaccess file will be modified to point any requests for that page to the cached file, bypassing ExpressionEngine entirely. All happens seamlessly: the URL will not change in their browser window as the server loads the cached file behind the scenes. This allows the user to still bookmark or link to your pages as usual.
The time to use this module is when your Site is being hammered by hundreds and thousands of requests every minute, as this creates an incredible strain on MySQL and PHP. When these requests are redirected to an already processed and cached page there will be no load placed on ExpressionEngine or on MySQL and PHP, thus preventing your server from slowing down and possibly crashing.
I have not yet used this module, but I trust add-ons from Solspace and Paul is an old hand at EE. The module costs $34.95 and is available now.
Posted on Feb 25, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
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Matthew Pennell — 22:23 on 02.25.2009
Looks nice, but I would hope that when EE2.0 comes out on top of CodeIgniter it will have this built in through CI’s pre-existing caching library.
James Riordon — 01:48 on 02.26.2009
Using .htaccess to by-pass MySQL and PHP redirect is a great idea for those slashdot times. A good temporary solution I suspect CI’s caching library would not handle so quite so well.
Deron Sizemore — 01:52 on 02.26.2009
Looks nice! I admit that I don’t have a whole lot of experience with page caching, etc and have only recently started using different forms of caching on my sites (tag caching, template caching). For those out there like me that set up a “static” weblog and use the “static/index” template for all static pages, and use template caching on that static page template, how much of improve performance could you expect using the Solspace Module over regular template caching? If I understand the differences correctly, the difference is that with Solspace, the page is an actual file on the server rather than pulling the info from the database?
Will this module only work with pages setup through the pages module?
Jamie Poitra — 05:21 on 02.26.2009
Yeah this is a lot different than Matthew is thinking. Its an actually static cache. I’m pretty sure CI and EE both only cache portions of a page and still compile that page on each load. This would eliminate all work done for a page server side except for the parsing of the .htaccess file.
Mitchell Kimbrough — 16:14 on 02.26.2009
The intent of Static Page Caching is triage.
I’ve lost track of how many times one of our client sites has crashed in the middle of a huge traffic spike. The idea of the module is that we don’t care where the problem is when we’re having a crisis. We just want relief.
We don’t care if the server is to blame, EE is to blame, our lousy templating is to blame, a janky module. We just don’t care. We want to get out of the jam quick so that we can have time to troubleshoot the source of the problem later when the client is not under stress.
I’ll blog more about it in a bit over at Solspace. Paul rocks of course.
mk
Lock — 02:33 on 09.29.2010
Any word of this being available for EE 2?
I have a high Traffic site that will have thousands of concurrent users hitting the site and this would be of great benefit.