I’ve been working on my version of Sunfox for the year 2008 (aka, the version I will start from every time I create a new site in 2008). I may have talked about it already in another post just before I left for Nebraska… but if not, that’s ok, it’s not relevant.
This morning I searched for how to achieve a particular mod rewrite. The rewrite was to help me get sunfox working on dreamhost (something I’ve done before, but I needed something special this time around.) What I didn’t expect to find though was an article on caching.
Caching is the fine art of making your site even faster by taking the dynamically (most likely database driven) content and storing it to flat files (static html) on the server. This speed up, although time wise is rather small, can free up a significant amount of resources.
The problem with sunfox though is that there are handfuls of tools within it that just can’t be cached. In my initial look at caching for Sunfox way back in the day, I had decided not to run any caching software for Sunfox because the amount of time it would take to check to see if a “cache” had been made and if it was up to date would have taken longer than it would have been to generate the page.
That said, I stumbled on a rewrite that allows a very basic level of caching using PHP and Apache mod rewrite. What’s curious about it is how easy it would be to add to Sunfox, and how easy it would be to prevent it from causing problems with things like password protected pages. The best part about the whole thing is that it requires nothing more than something we already do… Meaning it should take next to no additional processing time to check to see if the cache is full.
So here’s the link: http://www.hardcoder.com/server/caching.php
I’ll have to see about getting it added to sunfox here shortly.