November 24th, 2009

It's that time of the year again - for cliche turkey jokes of course! So what happens when your server just can't handle the load? You cache it somewhere else, of course! With performance on our mind from last month's presentation, we're pleased to welcome Jorge Lopez to speak on the art and science of stuffing stuff you need to somewhere else (ie, caching).

When scaling a web site from a few users to millions, the first pain point is almost always the database. Query optimizations only go so far, eventually data can no longer be retrieved from the database fast enough to accommodate the influx of client requests. This is the point where caching comes in to play.

This presentation covers all the layers of a LAMP stack where caching can be utilized to greatly increase the capacity of a site. Subjects such as the utilization of CDNs, template/output cache, key/value stores, and shared memory (APC) will be covered. I discuss lessons learned from working at various companies and giving real world examples (and numbers) as well as a guide to figuring which parts of a site should be cached first.

Jorge Lopez is a software engineer, cat lover, and avid PHP user since '98.

Thank you to IBM for providing a great presentation space in Midtown Manhattan. As a service to our community, New York PHP Community meetings are always free and open to the public.