I wrote a bash script this morning to report the size of WordPress cache folders, the number of files they contain, read each file to prime the OS disk cache, and optionally flush the OS disk cache as well. This might be a script you could execute to email a daily/weekly report of cache folder sizes, or perhaps execute during/after booting a server to prime the OS disk cache, or even on a regular schedule to make sure the OS cache is always primed. The script also has a “flush” argument to sync and drop the OS disk cache, which isn’t very useful (to me) except to see the difference in speed between a clean and primed cache (about 11s vs 0.4s for all websites on my server).
disk
Memcached vs Disk Cache
I recently added some disk caching for MySQL queries, WordPress objects, PHP opcode, and PHP web pages on my server. There are several different caching techniques and applications available, and memcached seems like one of the more popular ones. Right or wrong, it appears to be the default go-to for many developers these days.
Since I’m a SysAdmin by profession (with maybe a penchant for scripting and integration), I tend to have a more “systems” oriented approach — which led me to first consider, and then choose disk caching over memcached. In this post, I’ll outline the reasons I chose disk caching, and why in most circumstances it might be superior to memcached.