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Website Development Design and Hosting Lebanon
     Sat. February 04, 2012 - 02:18 GMT
:: PHP Acceleration and Caching Concerns

PHP acceleration and caching are both targeted towards speeding up PHP script execution on web servers. Both techniques provide higher performance by saving overhead related to PHP compilation. The main difference between acceleration and caching is the state that a PHP script is kept at. With acceleration, the PHP script is compiled once and saved in a compiled state either in memory or in the drive. In caching, web scripts are cached in a similar manner to the way proxy servers cache web pages.

PHP Cached Web Pages

With caching, the main concerns are pretty similar to those of proxy server caching concerns. This is mainly related to the algorithm that the caching engine will use to determine whether the cached copy of the PHP script is outdated or not. Main concerns are security and validity. Parameters that are given to a PHP script using POST and GET hashes can either contain constants or user-related dynamic variables. In the latter case, the security concern is obvious since the cached PHP script copy might lead to security breaches.

PHP Accelerated Web Pages

With acceleration, the concerns are totally different. PHP scripts are compiled and saved in a compiled state. No script hashes or any other form of input is usually saved. This, however, requires a mapping algorithm between the original PHP script and the saved compiled version. The mapping algorithm usually requires a mapping table (linked list for example) to be saved in memory all the time. Whenever a PHP script is requested from the web server, the acceleration module receives the request, maps the request to the compiled version using the mapping table, checks whether the original script should be recompiled or not, executes the compiled version and returns the result. The main accelerating feature is the time usually required to compile the PHP script every time it is requested from the web server.

The case that we are going to consider in this case is a commercial hosting company providing PHP acceleration within its hosting plans and services. Hundreds of websites are usually hosted on each web server. Each website contains hundreds, if not thousands, of PHP scripts that require PHP acceleration. In this case, the total number of PHP scripts per server might reach millions of files spread out through the many websites hosted on the same web server. The main concern is related to the mapping table structure. With millions of PHP scripts, the mapping table used can grow tremendously and, thus, memory consumption on the server grows as well. Although acceleration modules usually provide techniques for overcoming such problems by purging outdated scripts, the concerns remain valid since the purging algorithm is usually executed only under critical memory conditions.

The question is now changed into: What is the average memory consumption of the acceleration algorithm? Is this memory consumption affecting the performance of other servers such as the database server, mail servers, ftp servers, etc? This type of problems might lead to denial of service if memory consumption is not controlled properly.

Conclusion

PHP caching and acceleration are both techniques that might be implemented by hosting companies. This document describes the concerns that might arise in each case. It is advised to use PHP acceleration instead of PHP caching while performing continuous benchmark tests for memory consumption and enforcing memory limits on acceleration engines.


Victor Sawma is a member of NetDesignPlus ltd, a web development and design company based in Beirut, Lebanon with branches in Qatar. Victor is mainly interested in new techniques for improving website development techniques and web hosting features while preserving reliability, stability and security. For more information, visit www.netdesignplus.net

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