Benchmarking Zend_Cache backends for Magento
The Zend_Cache module from the Zend Framework is a nice piece of work. It has a slew of programmer-friendly frontends and a respectable set of backends with a well-designed interface. I love the a-la-carte approach, but I am only really interested in the Zend_Cache_Core frontend and the backends that support tagging since that is what is required by Magento. This begs the question, which backend should you use? While I have my own opinion on that matter (ahem, Redis. -post coming soon-ish), I wanted a reliable way to test Zend_Cache backend performances so I wrote a benchmark! This benchmark was both forked from and inspired by the benchmark found in Vinai Kopp’s Symlink Cache. It uses Magento’s core/cache model rather than Zend_Cache_Core directly so a Magento (or Magento-lite) installation and bash are the only requirements.
The purpose of this post is not to provide a bunch of cache backend benchmarks, but rather to simply introduce my benchmark code in the hopes that others conduct their own tests and hopefully publish their findings. A link to this post is appreciated. Also, if there are any criticisms of the benchmark I’d love to see a pull request. :)