Easily Speed Up Apache With mod_cache by 65%

Not too many people know that Apache2 provides a simple caching module mod_cache.

It’s super simple to enable for a static site like this one and gave me a %65 performance increase!

Here’s how.

Enable the Apache2 mods

First, enable the two cache mods that are installed along with Apache2:

a2enmod cache
a2enmod cache_disk
systemctl reboot

Configure the VirtualHost file

Next, open your site’s VirtualHost file and add the following code block between the <VirtualHost> tags:

<IfModule mod_cache.c>
    CacheQuickHandler on
    <IfModule mod_cache_disk.c>
        CacheRoot "/var/cache/apache2/mod_cache_disk"
        CacheEnable disk  "/"
        CacheDirLevels 5
        CacheDirLength 3
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Then, restart Apache2:

systemctl restart apache2.service

And you’re done!

mod_cache logging

This step is option but will allow you to see what requests are getting cached.

First, open the main Apache2 configuration. On Debian and Ubuntu this is /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Add the following new line:

LogFormat "%r\" \"%{cache-status}e\"" cachelog

This line creates a new log format called cachelog that records the requested file its cache status.

Next, open your site’s <VirtualHost> file again and add the following new logging line:

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/cache.log cachelog

Restart Apache2 and you’re done.

The new log file will get written to /var/log/apache2/cache.log. Requests that are served from the cache look like the following:

GET /guides/varnish-loadbalancer-ubuntu-20-04/ HTTP/1.1" "cache hit"

Benchmarks

I used the Siege HTTP benchmarking tool from a second server on a local 100MBps VLAN.

I created a list of URLs with this wget command:

wget --spider --force-html -r -l5 https://<SITE> 2>&1 | grep '^--' | awk '{ print $3 }'  >urls.txt

Then I launched Siege with the following settings:

siege -t 10s -b -f urls.txt

This runs Siege for 10 seconds in max-speed, benchmark mode using the list of URLs in urls.txt.

The average number of successful requests over 10 seconds was:

Cache Status	Result
No mod_cache	840
With mod_cache	1290

That’s over 100 requests per second from a $5 USD per month virtual machine!