ExtendedFragmentCache

About

The extended_fragment_cache plugin provides content interpolation and an in-process memory cache for fragment caching. It also integrates the features of Yan Pritzker’s memcache_fragments plugin since they both operate on the same methods.

Installation

This plugin requires that the memcache-client gem is installed. # gem install memcache-client
Install the plugin OR the gem $ script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/zventstools/projects/extended_fragment_cache
- OR -
# gem install extended_fragment_cache

In-Process Memory Cache for Fragment Caching

Fragment caching has a slight inefficiency that requires two lookups within the fragment cache store to render a single cached fragment. The two cache lookups are:

The read_fragment method invoked in a controller to determine if a fragment has already been cached. e.g.,
```
unless read_fragment("/x/y/z")
 ...
end
```
The cache helper method invoked in a view that renders the fragment. e.g.,
```
<% cache("/x/y/z") do %>
  ...
<% end %>
```

This plugin adds an in-process cache that saves the value retrieved from the fragment cache store. The in-process cache has two benefits:

It cuts in half the number of read requests sent to the fragment cache store. This can result in a considerable saving for sites that make heavy use of memcached.
Retrieving the fragment from the in-process cache is faster than going to fragment cache store. On a typical dev box, the savings are relatively small but would be noticeable in standard production environment using memcached (where the fragment cache could be remote)

Peter Zaitsev has a great post comparing the latencies of different cache types on the MySQL Performance blog: www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/08/09/cache-performance-comparison/

The plugin automatically installs a before_filter on the ApplicationController that flushes the in-process memory cache at the start of every request.

Content Interpolation for Fragment Caching

Many modern websites mix a lot of static and dynamic content. The more dynamic content you have in your site, the harder it becomes to implement caching. In an effort to scale, you’ve implemented fragment caching all over the place. Fragment caching can be difficult if your static content is interleaved with your dynamic content. Your views become littered with cache calls which not only hurts performance (multiple calls to the cache backend), it also makes them harder to read. Content interpolation allows you substitude dynamic content into cached fragment.

Take this example view: <% cache(“/first_part”) do %>

This content is very expensive to generate, so let's fragment cache it.<br/>

<% end %> <%= Time.now %><br/> <% cache(“/second_part”) do %>

This content is also very expensive to generate.<br/>

<% end %>

We can replace it with: <% cache(“/only_part”, {}, => Time.now) do %>

This content is very expensive to generate, so let's fragment cache it.<br/>
__TIME_GOES_HERE__<br/>
This content is also very expensive to generate.<br/>

<% end %>

The latter is easier to read and induces less load on the cache backend.

We use content interpolation at Zvents to speed up our JSON methods. Converting objects to JSON representation is notoriously slow. Unfortunately, in our application, each JSON request must return some unique data. This makes caching tedious because 99% of the content returned is static for a given object, but there’s a little bit of dynamic data that must be sent back in the response. Using content interpolation, we cache the object in JSON format and substitue the dynamic values in the view.

This plugin integrates Yan Pritzker’s extension that allows content to be cached with an expiry time (from the memcache_fragments plugin) since they both operate on the same method. This allows you to do things like:

<% cache(“/only_part”, => 15.minutes) do %>

This content is very expensive to generate, so let's fragment cache it.

<% end %>

Bugs, Code and Contributing

There.s a RubyForge project set up at:

rubyforge.org/projects/zventstools/

Anonymous SVN access:

$ svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/zventstools

Author: Tyler Kovacs (tyler dot kovacs at gmail dot com)