Re: Template caches
On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Bill Moseley wrote: > Now, let say for once we do have a limited amount of memory, and we have a > very large number of templates, and the templates are very large and mostly > plain old text. In other words, the compiled templates are basically big > print statements with only a small part being variable interpolation. > Since the templates are large, I could imagine a situation where the > compiled template cache is thrashed, or at least the templates don't live > in the cache very long. There are two situations I can realistically see this being a problem: 1. You haven't bought enough memory for your server considering your data set and other issues. 2. You are an ISP running one of these template systems, with multiple virtual hosts. I actually don't have any solutions to this, and its exactly the reason I want to bring Mason and AxKit together, because AxKit sure does use a lot of memory. The only real benefit is where you've got static files in the cache. You can effectively stop the server (clearing the cache) and restart it and deliver from the cache. Provided nothing changes the templates will never be loaded again. -- Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions Email for training and consultancy availability. http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org
Re: Template caches
On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Bill Moseley wrote: > Now, let say for once we do have a limited amount of memory, and we have a > very large number of templates, and the templates are very large and mostly > plain old text. In other words, the compiled templates are basically big > print statements with only a small part being variable interpolation. > Since the templates are large, I could imagine a situation where the > compiled template cache is thrashed, or at least the templates don't live > in the cache very long. Mason tries to address this by checking for the amount of text in a template and turning large plain text sections into subroutine calls that read the text from disk. I think this is a good solution that other systems would do well to emulate. (Of course you can adjust what counts as "a large amount of text" according to your available free RAM.) Mason also has a very nice size-limiting scheme for the cache, using an least-frequently-used + aging algorithm for its removal policy. > And the text segments could be shared by all server processes by using > IPC::Sharable -- or maybe it would be fast enough to let the OS file system > buffer the commonly used templates, or use a database to load the text > segments. Just let the filesystem do it. It's much simpler and it lets the OS handle things that the OS is good at. - Perrin
