The BileBlog

Over the course of the last few days, I’ve been helping out Chris Miller with a big update to OSCache. Needless to say, I’ve formulated a few less than happy thoughts about the whole thing which I must now expunge forthwith.

I’ve never been a heavy oscache user. In fact, my usage of it has been very limited, and often wrapped around in a lot of custom code, rather far from the default usage/settings. The problem however is that most people completely abuse this library. OSCache users, brace yourselves, I’m about to be rather rude to you…

Idiots! If your project does not run well without OSCache, you should be utterly ashamed of yourself. It shows that you might well have a lovely design that’ll make bloggers everywhere swoon with admiration and want to have your babies, but it also means you don’t know the first thing about optimisation. OSCache simply hides the problem (rather effectively sometimes). Somehow, you forgot to think about the feelings of that poor bastard who hits an uncached page, or that hapless fool who goes to a page which needs to be refreshed. He’s a small lone voice out there, to be sure. He’s also probably somewhat lacking in confidence, and will probably blame his network connection first. Even if he does suspect foul play, he’ll refresh the page and lo and behold, it’s speedy the next time round, so he assumes it was his own fault somehow.

Well folks, the joke is up. The next time you go to a vaguely java related page and you notice huge differences in speed sometimes, it’s because you’re hitting on the ‘real’ page, the one which shows the full ugly truth of the careless disregard for performance that the developer feels. That selfsame developer who casually calls database queries in tight loops in the name of functionality. The one who will lecture you on the finer points of MVC design, the one who scoffs at scriptlets and likes all their code to be in XML, preferably parsed (or executed!) per request (naturally), with as much reflection as possible to impress their friends and family.

All OSCache does in these situations is simply encourage this needless cruelty to users. You’re sacrificing the one for the many. To you, it’s alright if some people die for the greater good, you probably approve of capital punishment even if it has a 50% rate of guilty convictions.

Of course, this is ignoring the fairly disturbing problems with OSCache itself. I personally am horrified that people would run such code on a production system. Does nobody care about scalability or uptime anymore? Clustering? Is everyone writing apps that have a few hundred hits a day on a good day? Here’s a brief rundown of some of the problems in the current ‘production’ release: