Question

I am using onapp api in my website and in a page it is fetching all the servers in onapp. For some users this list is very large and it extends upto thousand in some cases. The response is not only data but it contains other information too. Also I am doing a pagination. So for each api has to be called and data should be populated. Now for increasing the speed of this I am writting the response to a file and reading from it. But it also taking time. Is there anyway to spped up this operation.

Before file caching, each page was taking around 45 seconds and now it is reduced to 25. But this is also a high value . I am using Symfony Framework. I am using the following code for caching data to file.

   $userStatisticsCached=unserialize(file_get_contents($filePath));
    if(is_null($userStatisticsCached)||$userStatisticsCached==false){
        $userStatistics = $statisticsInstance->getList(1);
        file_put_contents($filePath, serialize($userStatistics));
    }
    else {
        $userStatistics=$userStatisticsCached;
    }

Is there any better method for achieving the same output with less loading time ?

Answer 1

First: 45seconds is a lot to load a page. How many API calls are you making?

Second: Whoa, 25seconds when having all API calls already cached in filesystem is absolutely huge, too. How many filesystem lookups does your page load perform? Are you sure all your API requests are cached when measuring the 25s page load?

In-Memory Caching:
Depending on the size of your data, I would certainly suggest storing your cached data in memory to speed up cache lookups. For caches around 1GB or less it shouldn’t be an issue (depending on what server hardware/hosting provider you are running on). An excellent first choice is Memcache, which also happens to have good PHP support.

Running Memcache: When working locally on your computer you should have no problem installing memcached for yourself. When you upload your website to the server, you’ll either need to ensure that Memcache is running on the same server, or ask your server hosting provider for details on how to connect to their memcache server. Most PHP hosting providers offer Memcache as part of the hosting. If they don’t, you can use a hosted remote memcache provider like MemCachier, although again the latency to a remote server is going to slow down your cache lookups.