A Place in the Forest

Last year, when I was doing MySQL Professional Services, I encountered a client that was already using memcached. Something they said they were doing was they were caching the compiled bytecode of their PHP code in their memcached, which was a big win because they ran a large fleet of identical PHP based application servers. As soon as any one server encountered a given new piece of PHP, it would compile it and cache it, and immediately all the other app servers could use the same cached compiled bytecode, rather than repeat that work. They had recently changed to this approach, from caching the compiled bytecode on the disk of each app server.

I thought that was really neat, and kept digging elsewhere into their performance and scaling issues.

I had just assumed that this was some open source project, a modification or module to an existing PHP bytecode compiler / cacher / accelerator.

Except, it seems to not be. I've spend a couple of days now googling and reading up on the various "PHP accelerators", and they all appear to cache to disk or cache to local shared memory, but I can't find a reference anywhere to coupling one with memcached.

Am I just missing something, is my google-fu failing me, is this something this shop had written from scratch?

Do any of my readers know?

A MySQL network storage engine for MogileFS.

After writing the MySQL Storage Engine for Amazon S3, and having heavily dug into the storage engine for MemCacheD, it can't really be that hard.

Would it be useful?