WinCache Showing Very Nice Results

Question

User-2140010589 posted

I just wanted to post and let you all know that we've deployed the Windows Cache Extension on our site with very good results. The performance improvement was immediate and readily noticeable. We serve more than 40 million page views a month and we've had people comment that while the site wasn't slow before it now feels nearly instantaneous. That's good!

Previously we were using EAccelerator. We run our server farm at about 20% CPU utilization for normal traffic to allow for spikes. What I've noticed is that it appears that page creation times are similar, though a touch lower, even when the server is almost nearly unloaded. That leads me to believe that the performance impact seems to have been reduced in the startup phase of the script. It is my gut instinct that possibly we were not seeing the performance we could have out of EA because of blocking, disk access for file access checking or something similar.

 Does anyone have an opinion on that? I'm curious because knowing the source of the performance difference would be important to us for planning going forward. Since it doesn't seem to be purely page execution time I'm curious what else is involved and how I might be able to adjust our instrumentation to get visibility into that.

Answer 1

User-1405480850 posted

Hi,

Thanks for the post. I have seen people measuring any cache solution performance in variety of ways and different parameters. I can say a good caching solution should at minimal do the below:

• Number of requests served per second should go up.
• Response time will decrease, some hosters I have talked to are very particular about response time.
• CPU utilization should go down because everything is served from cache, so you save on disk access as well as CPU cycle to create byte code again.

I am not sure about EA but WINCACHE does all. We store the byte code as well as file in shared memory. Because of this one will see a significant performance improvement of their PHP application. You should identify which performance parameter is most important and see how much improvements you are getting because of WINCACHE.

Regards,

Don.

Answer 2

User531717643 posted

me too. I had used EA. but I think the wincache fast better than EA. So I have using wincache and see get fast run in php.

where are config wincache files?  

 

Answer 3

User-1405480850 posted

Not sure what do you mean by config file. We do have WINCACHE related PHP INI directives. There is no separate configuration file for WINCACHE. A list of WINCACHE INI directive can be found at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/678/using-windows-cache-extension-for-php/. Please refer to this article for details.

A typical PHPINFO page will also display all the WINCACHE directives.

If you want anything special or any other INI directive which think will be useful and missing do let us know.

Thanks,

Don.

Answer 4

User1903957255 posted
WOW! We replaced xcache on our facebook game (http://apps.facebook.com/fbarena with 3 million pageviews per day) and the results are SHOCKING IMPRESSIVE! KUDOS FOLKS!

Answer 5

User-1405480850 posted

Thank you for such a nice comment.

Don.

Answer 6

User2093557029 posted

I'd also like to echo the kudos on all the fine work been done here. Though I'm not seeing the traffic some of the other posters are, I am seeing similar results in the reduction in content delivery time. Average page execution times have been more than halved! 

http://www.iis-aid.com/articles/performance_testing/wincache_performance_live_site

Answer 7

User-1405480850 posted

Hi,

THANK YOU so much. Kudos really motivate us and special thanks for publishing the benchmark results. The benchmark results coming from real customers really look extremely encouraging.

Regards,

Don.