The Modular Company (TMC)

After a long long (very long!) phonecall with Joyce yesterday where I tried to put my frustrations about the drupal way into words today I decided to take a different approach.

I'm so concerned with the performance of the smaller sites because any one of them has the potential to grow that I am afraid that if one of them does take off that we'd have to rebuild the whole thing without drupal in order to be able to achieve adequate performance. Clearly that would suck :)

Enter Xcache. http://xcache.lighttpd.net/ The people that make 'lighthttpd' are now producing a piece of software that caches the php code that makes up a site in order to save the repetitive interpretation process that causes PHP to read all the bits of code that make up a program every time the program gets executed. This is quite inefficient. What Xcache does is it sets up a block of memory to store the compiled intermediary code that php can then interpret without having to read the file again and again on each request.

The results are quite impressive. Most of the pages that I tested with got anywhere from 5 to 10 times as fast as before.

Because the people that build php have their own competing product ('zend') there is not much chance that something like xcache will make it to become part of the default PHP installation but I think if they would do that it would be to everybody's advantage.