We support the Hypersites development team in handling all their colocation and load balancing systems and occasionally doing web application consulting for them to help make their site better, faster, stronger and more agile. The Hypersites Application Builder is truly a marvelous piece of software. You should give it a spin for your next web project.
One of the underlying parts of their architecture that we advised them on long ago was to utilize the compression based encoding that most browsers support to reduce the actual amount of traffic sent over the internet to deliver a page. Another item was to build out versions of the pages that their system created and store those in a caching system of some sort. We had considered using memcache, which is a great way of storing that transient data that most web apps end up creating/using, but they decided on a much simpler (KISS) database table.
In that table are stored 3 versions of a page’s html: plain html, gzip and compress
The team recently made a change in their code so that instead of grabbing all three columns of data from the cache table, then choosing which version of the data to use, they chose which column to select before making the query.
The result: In about 70% of the calls to the cache table, the query result dropped to 10% of it’s original size.
By making a simple change to the logic in their code, they accelerated their software (at least that portion of the code) by TEN FOLD, something which no amount of reasonably-priced hardware upgrades would have accomplished.
Very cool and a good lesson.