Any experience using Drupal with Apache mod_cache?
Hey.
So I have a site that is expected to get incredibly high traffic for short periods of time, so I have begun to investigate some of the various caching options. The Drupal cache has done some pretty good things performance wise, but I wanted to test out Apache caching with mod_cache. I feel like it is not working as it should because it is still going to the DB for every single request to revalidate. I think this is b/c the Expires header is set to 1978 and the Cache-Control is set to no-cache when not using the drupal page cache and must-revalidate when using the page cache. This is still causing Drupal to boot up, connect to the DB and check the data only to return a 304. I am only trying to cache for a short time frame of, say, 5 minutes, so I dont care if some things are cache. I was disabling caching on /admin and /user (I'll worry about /node later)
My question is, has anyone successfully gotten Apache caching working with Drupal? If so, did it require overriding the default Expires and Cache-Control headers?
Any insight would help, thanks for responses,
Frank
Did you figure it out? I'm
Did you figure it out? I'm interested as well.
No, not yet.
I found a few other workarounds for the time being, this seems like something we *should* be able to do though. So far no dice. :-(
If you take a look at
If you take a look at drupal.org headers you'll notice that Expires header is set for 1978 only for content.
All the images (and .js, .css files) have Expires header set to future date.
As far as I know sometimes you simply can't cache pages (eg. when you use token.module) so content itself will not be cached externally but all the other files can still be cached :]
I was not able to get it to
I was not able to get it to work...but I was able to get some inconsistent behavior by changing some of the headers that drupal was outputting (in core).
I didn't try the latest version of apache, which has more options than the version I was using...so I wouldn't call the topic dead.
That said, I went ahead and used boost. Then I created a module with a hook_init that set the user to anonymous for all non-dynamic pages...then in boost I set it so the DRUPAL_ID cookie would only be set for certain roles...etc...
The point is, I now have caching for all anonymous users and all pages that don't need the user logged in.
This is just a quick overview...get your hands dirty in boost and mod_rewrite and you'll be able to have static-page times for all pages that don't have to be generated live on demand. I may put a write up of my implementation on the drupal high performance group pages...we'll see (I'm not done).
you may find this article
you may find this article quite interesting - http://wimleers.com/article/improving-drupals-page-loading-performance