Month: April 2010

Enabling HTTP Page Caching with PHP

I’ve been doing a lot of work on BookScouter.com lately to reduce page load time and generally increase the performance of the website for both users and bots. One of the tips that the load time analyzer points out is to enable an expiration time for static content. That is easy enough for images and such by using an Apache directive such as:

    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
    ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
    ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

But pages generated with PHP by default have the Pragma: no-cache header set, so that the users’ browsers do not cache the content at all. In most cases, even hitting the back button will generate another request to the server which must be completely processed by the script. You may be able to cache some of the most intensive operations inside your script, but this solution will eliminate that request completely. Simply add this code to the top of any page that contains semi-static content. It effectively sets the page expiration time to one hour in the future. So if a visitor hits the same URL within that hour, the page is served locally from their browser cache instead of making a trip to the server. It also sends an HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response code if the user requests to reload the page within the specified time. That may or may-not be desired based on your site.

$expire_time = 60*60; // One Hour
header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time() + $expire_time));
header("Cache-Control: max-age={$expire_time}");
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time()));
header('Pragma: public');

if ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'])) && (time() - strtotime($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) < = $expire_time)) {
    header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified');
    exit;
}

Skipping the DROP TABLE, CREATE TABLE statements in a large mysqldump file.

I have a large table of test data that I’m copying into some development environments. I exported the table with a mysqldump which has a DROP TABLE and CREATE TABLE statements at the top

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `mytable`;
CREATE TABLE `mytable` (
  `somecol` varchar(10) NOT NULL default '',
   ... other columns ...
  PRIMARY KEY  (`somecol`),
  KEY `isbn10` (`somecol`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

The problem is that the developer has altered the table and re-importing the test data would undo those changes. Editing the text file is impractical because of its size (500 MB gzipped). So I came up with this workaround which just slightly alters the SQL using sed so that it doesn’t try to drop or recreate the table. It comments out the DROP TABLE line, and creates the new table in the test database instead of the real database.

zcat bigfile.sql.gz |sed "s/DROP/-- DROP/"|sed "s/CREATE TABLE /CREATE TABLE test./"|mysql databasename