Sessions

Layers of Caching: Key to scaling your website

*
Accepted Session
Chemistry
Short form
osb2009-0133
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 from 1:45 – 2:30pm in Hawthorne
Session notes

Excerpt

Caching is essential to ensuring that your website will survive a large spike in traffic. With so many different forms of caching, how are you supposed to know what works and why you should use it? The key is layering your site with several forms of caching.

Description

Caching is essentially a way of keeping the most used parts of a website in memory so that it gets served quickly. This will reduce CPU and I/O overhead and thus make the site very fast. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen magically without some extra work.

This talk will cover the several layers that you should know about how they improve the sites speed. Some of these will include:

  • Squid / mod_cache (disk backed caching)
  • memcached
  • APC & other opcode caching
  • Application level caching
  • Configuring Apache properly
  • Solutions for python & ruby

I will also go over how we utilize caching on the Drupal infrastructure which is hosted at the OSL along with other real world examples.

Tags

caching, performance, hosting, memcached, apc

Back to list of sessions

Speakers

  • Lance-osuosl

    Lance Albertson

    OSU Open Source Lab

    Biography

    Lance is the Lead Systems Administrator/Architect for the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) and a Gentoo Linux Developer. He joined the Gentoo Linux project in 2003 and have been involved in managing their infrastructure and maintaining about a dozen or so packages in portage. Lance manages all of the hosting activities that the OSL provides for the open source community including projects such as Kernel.org, Drupal, Apache Software Foundation, and many many more. Lance has been at the OSL since 2007.

    Previously Lance was a UNIX Administrator for the Enterprise Server Technologies group at Kansas State University helping maintain campus email along with other various tasks. Previous to that, he worked with his dad near Hiawatha, Kansas on the family farm growing corn and soybeans.

    In his free time he helps organize the Corvallis Beer and Blog and plays trumpet in a local jazz group The Infallible Collective.

    Sessions

  • Narayan Newton

    Tag1 Consulting/Drupal Association/Open Source Lab

    Biography

    Narayan Newton is a partner at Tag1 Consulting, one of the two leading Drupal Performance Groups and the founding member of the “Drupal Performance Agency,” a loose collection of the best Drupal Performance Consultants. He is currently working for multiple clients helping them launch enterprise-scale Drupal sites. Narayan is a specialist in:

    • Memcache Integration
    • Reverse Proxy Caching
    • APC Caching
    • Apache Performance
    • JavaScript Aggregation
    • CSS Aggregration
    • SQL Query Optimization
    • MySQL Database Systems
    • Linux VFS Tuning

    Narayan Newton (nnewton) is the Server Coordinator for the Drupal Association and a General Assembly member for the Association.

    Sessions