Caching methods

MuntInternet is vastly experienced in building and managing large and complex hosting platforms. We’re put to the test by clients who receive millions of visitors a day on their hosting platforms. By applying varying methods and technologies, we are able to offer a smaller hosting platform and therefore reduce costs, often leading to significant savings! In order to get an impression of what we might do for you, please get to know some technologies we often use:

Varnish

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed to support dynamic websites. Varnish was exclusively designed as an HTTP accelerator and doesn’t work on FTP, SMTP proxy and other protocols which are often supported by other software solutions. This is a good thing, as Varnish was built just to be an HTTP accelerator; it is a very efficient solution.

Varnish puts data into the virtual memory while it lets the operating system decide what is placed into the memory and what is loaded from the hard drives. This is a great help in circumventing situations in which the operation system caches data while the application has already moved it to the hard drives.

In addition to this functionality, Varnish is also a ‘threaded’ solution. This means that each connection is dealt with through a separate worker thread. If more connections enter the system than allowed by the determined limit, the new incoming connections are placed on a waiting list. If this list runs into yet another determined limit, other new incoming connections are rejected.

Vanish is highly configurable in comparison to other accelerators. Another great benefit is that the configuration can be adjusted without restarting the service, which makes it ideal for environments requiring continuous uptime.

Memcached

Memcached is often deployed to accelerate websites with an intensive database usage. Data and objects are cached into the RAM in order to reduce the number of times an external data source (database or API) needs to be read.

APC

APC is a PHP opcode caching system. Its goal is to provide for a solid framework that guarantees caching and optimized PHP code. APC can also be used as user cache for application data.

ZFS

ZFS is a file system that offers interesting caching options. ZFS uses several layers of caching in order to accelerate the read and write operations. Although the best theoretical route to do so would be to save all data directly to the RAM, this is a practical impossibility. ZFS therefore distributes the important data to the RAM or faster (SSD) hard drives, while placing the less important data on hard drives; therewith creating a great balance between performances and costs.

ZEND (SERVER)

Zend provides code caching and acceleration services, as well as data caching and content (html output) caching) it also provides for download optimization and offline (asynchronous) processes. This results in a performance increase for a large number of PHP applications. ZEND also offers a small segment with PHP monitoring and ‘root cause’ analysis that supports in the task of optimizing efficient and correctly functional code.

The aforementioned technical solutions are just a handful out of a toolkit we have available for our clients. We’re masters in the art of selecting and configuring the best possible selection of software solutions for each situation, resulting into a total hosting environment which is as small and cost-effective as possible. Keeping track of the latest technologies is a standard procedure and policy with MuntInternet. We implement those new technologies on a large internal test platform we use to gain hands-on experience. Did we mention that we are often actually the first hosting provider able to implement these new technologies in live platforms? This continuous head-start provides us with an edge over our competitors. It’s good to be us.

APPROACH

We’re able to review existing platforms currently hosted at a third party, or design an entirely new platform. In a close cooperation with yourself, the MuntInternet team member with the greatest project affinity will be connected to your project and service you. In some cases this engineer will be supported by a project manager, in other cases by an account manager.

MuntInternet is home to proven professionals in the management of applications, servers and systems. We’ve also cooperated with pretty much every development partner, both in the Netherlands as abroad, which makes it quite a bit easier to assist in the deployment or migration of a new application.