I’m implementing a PHP script which will need some caching capabilities.
I’m trying to determine which caching strategy to use for user data assuming that the script is running on a single server.
I’m probably looking at about 50k different keys. The data for each key is not very big – in most cases less than 5kb.
I have implemented a key / value file cache where I md5 hash the key to determine the file name for the hashed file. I then store it in a directory tree with 256 files at each level in order to avoid having too many files in one directory.
It appears that with this setup HD performance is becoming a bottleneck. Would I be better of with using memcached?
APC or similar is not an option since the PHP files are ioncube encoded and it appears they don’t play well together.
memcached is a really good choice for this since it’s optimized for key/value caching. Otherwise, you can create a RAM disk and save your cached files to that “disk” instead