The button cache
Just upgraded the apache installations to support the disk cache. This is part of the plan to move all the sites over to template themes (which is in turn so that we can improve the page structure without having to fix up multiple stylesheets).

One of the features of the template theme engine is that the toolbar buttons are automatically generated on demand. You can select a new colour for the theme and matching buttons will magically appear - no photoshop required.

When we move the main site onto the template theme, that will mean a lot of people will be making a lot of small dynamic requests of the site (paint me a green button) and this could cause some overhead.

Apache now has built-in caching which seems a good fit for this. I've enabled it on the live servers (but just for the button URLs) so that images will be recalculated once every 15 minutes. Seems to be working fine - I can clear the browser cache and request another page, seeing the button image requests logged in apache but not tomcat. Performance seems fine.

T

Labels: caching, config, infrastructure

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:20 AM