MemProxy 0.1 is out!  It has taken me a while, but I have finally gotten around to releasing the code that I credited with saving us during a Yahoo! mention.  It is a caching proxy "server" that uses memcached for storing the cache.  I put server in quotes because it is really just a PHP script that handles the caching and talking to the application servers.  Apache and other HTTP servers already do a good job talking HTTP to a vast myriad of clients.  I did not see any reason to reinvent the wheel.  Here are some of the features that make it different from anything I could find:

  • Uses memcached for storage

  • Serves cache headers to clients based on TTL of cached data

  • Uses custom headers to assemble multiple pieces of cache into one object

  • Minimal dependencies.  Only PHP and pecl/memcached needed.

  • Small code base.  It is just two files, one when settings are cached.

  • Application agnostic.  If the backend is hosted on an HTTP server this can cache it.


Some other things it does that you might expect:

  • Handles HTTP 1.1 requests to the backend

  • Allows TTLs set by the standard Cache-Control header

  • Appears transparent to the client.

  • Sends proper HTTP error codes relating to proxies/gateways

  • Allows pages to be refreshed or removed from cache

  • Allows a page to be viewed from the application server without caching it

  • more....


You can find the code on Google Code.  The code (or something like it rather) has been in use at dealnews for well over a year.  But, this is a new code base.  It had to be refactored for public consumption.  So, there may be bugs.