Feature additions and bug fixes coming up in WinCache
We are seeing huge momentum behind adoption of WinCache. In the month of September, WinCache v1 Beta was downloaded more than 13,000 time making it one of the most downloaded IIS extensions in the first month following its release. Many happy customers chose to run it on their production servers despite its beta tag. We got very encouraging feedback from the beta release and we are pushing hard for our next release. Our next release date is approaching fast and I wanted to give an update on new features and bug fixes. If your favorite feature was missing in the beta and is also not in the list below, please email me or post on the forums so that we can consider it for future releases of WinCache.
Bug FixesWe fixed a bug due to which same file was getting included twice even when include_once/require_once was used. Some PHP applications didn’t work due to this bug.
Few customers reported crashes when running WinCache on their test servers. This was because file cache component didn’t cache zero-size files properly.
One customer didn’t see enough performance improvement when using cakephp. This was because of a bug in opcode cache which caused us to recompile the code every time.
One bug caused opcode cache’s total hit count to be negative after first request. Also hit count of different file entries in file cache was one more than expected. Both of these bugs are fixed.
WinCache caches compile time errors and warnings generated by PHP engine. We fixed a bug due to which warning/errors caching sometimes caused next request to return 500.
New features
We are adding an API “bool wincache_refresh_if_changed()” to force a file change check on a file next time it is used from cache. This is useful if you change a file in PHP code and you want next request to load the file from disk again. You can pass blank or null which tells API to refresh all the files in the cache. An array of absolute/relative paths as argument will make WinCache only refresh these file entries. Please note that file will be reloaded from disk only if a file change is detected. This API enforces a file change check and not necessarily removal of cached entry.
In the next release, users will be able to disable file change checks completely by setting value of wincache.chkinterval to 0. When file change checks are disabled, changed file will be reloaded only when wincache_refresh_if_changed is called or IIS application pool is recycled. Cached files will still get removed by scavenger when the file is not used for a long time causing wincache to load the file again.
Another feature getting added is to enable administrators choose a list of websites for which wincache.ocenabled property is opposite of global setting affecting all the websites. This was requested by a hoster who wanted a safe and quick mechanism to turn-off WinCache for websites which run into some problems.
By default, caching in WinCache will be disabled when PHP is running in CLI (command line) mode. Setting wincache.enablecli to 1 will turn on caching in CLI mode.
We will be exposing total_cache_uptime property from wincache_fcache_fileinfo() and wincache_ocache_fileinfo() which will give total cache uptime in seconds.
On popular demand, we are including a PHP script (wincache.php) in WinCache setup which users can use to see cache statistics.
If you haven’t had a chance to test your PHP application with WinCache yet, download and try it out today. We are looking forward to your feature requests, bugs and general feedback to guide us for future releases of WinCache.
Thanks,
Kanwal