I've created an empty site to test some of the improvements on speed that I've applied on latest Icy Phoenix RC.
Here is the link:
http://www.icyphoenix.com/_fnf/forum.php
If you load the page and refresh it in few seconds you will notice that forum index will load with only 1 SQL.
The same happens on many other pages.
This means that with this release MySQL is heavily optimized and the package make an extended use of the cache system.
This new approach has some advantages, but also disavantages.
Let me try to analyze some of them.
Advantages:
- Really quick page loading.
- Very small use of SQL queries (this saves also bandwidth, CPU charge and DB requests).
- Quick loading even on large forums, because large arrays of queries do not need to be recreated each time a page is loaded.
Disadvantages:
- Extended use of cache may imply an higher probability of files corruption (it could be important to set some CRON to clear the cache regularly).
- Many files inclusions: cache folders should be secured with htaccess where available or other security measures, to avoid hacking of those files. This doesn't mean that Icy Phoenix isn't secure. All the modern Bulletin Boards rely on cache, I would like only to stress the security issue on a folder which contains many files to be included, since most of the hacking techniques rely on RFI (Remote Files Inclusions).
- Server with slow files access may be slowest in page loading respect to the absence of cache (if your DB is really fast and your server has a slow file access for many reasons I won't go further, then it could be better do not using the caching system...). Before going final I hope to be able to implement a switch to disable the caching system for the db so you can test your server with and without SQL caching.
I'll keep this post updated for all the matters regarding the new caching system.
Please note that with this release is really important to apply the correct permissions to the cache folders.
