File based caching on high traffic website

If you have a lot of traffic, and you’re caching a page for an hour… Over the course of one hour, you may read the file possibly 200 times, and write just once… The time taken to write is minimal, around 10ms? - So, out of one hour, you have 10ms ‘downtime’ for your cache reads.

Which is 0.00027% downtime… Extremely minimal, and not really worth worrying about.
Locks will only cause this fractional locking time, and, if it only effects 2 people trying to write at the same time.

The correct way to work around it is explained here:-

* 1 page is cached for an hour.
* When that cache expires, 2 people visit the site with 10ms of each other (the only time this will cause an ‘issue’, because otherwise, the first will have written the cache before the second requests the page).
* The first user ‘reads’ the cache file, sees it’s expired so begins rendering the page normally with PHP/MySQL
* The second user has the same thing going on… the cache hasn’t been updated by the second user.
* The first user finishes building the page, and begins writing the file, locking it.
* The second user also finishes building the page, and attempts to write it.
* Because the first user has locked the file, the second user can’t write it…
* This is a problem for the second user, so you simply build a little fix to make it all work like magic.

If the second user can’t write the the cache (because it is locked), simply echo the contents of the rendered page, not saving it to the cache.
The first user is dealing with the cache, so just render the output.

With Codegniter, this is how it works…

Line 299 of Output.php:-


if ( ! $fp = @fopen($cache_path, 'wb'))
        {
            log_message('error', "Unable to write cache file: ".$cache_path);
            return;
        }

The cache file is only written if it’s ‘really_writable’ (not locked)

Line 59 of Output.php:


elseif (($fp = @fopen($file, 'ab')) === FALSE)
    {
        return FALSE;


So… if we cant write it, just render the second users’ request.

Simple, and it works, beautifully... :-)