[Radiant] Caching and optimizations

[Frederico Oliveira]

On 8/18/06, John W. Long <ng at johnwlong.com> wrote:
> I don't have plans to change the caching mechanism. Are you really
> experiencing that much load that regenerating the page every five
> minutes or so is a problem? I would find that really, really surprising.
> If you were you could probably afford to buy new hardware or approach
> the issue from a different angle.

It ultimately depends on the site's usage patterns. In a packed
environment (like shared hosting), it may become a big concern - if
most page requests are non-cached, CPU usage for dispatchers goes way
up when taking hits (possibly blowing up CPU-time limits).

It is a fact that most people wont run into this sort of situation,
but those I describe on the above paragraph might. Naturally most
people with critical pages will choose to run them on dedicated setups
(possibly even balanced environments), so it wont become a liability.

Still, giving users the chance to change the ResponseCache expiry
times in, say, a config file would be a safe bet. Naturally anyone can
change the ResponseCache model and do it themselves (like I have, for
pages who don't get too many updates - since there's a clever Clear
Page Cache button to override the expiry time), but maybe that's one
of the things where configuration comes in handy for people who'll be
deploying a lot of pages.

Fred