I have thought about Memcached. But you would not store the static file in Memcached. Only the information about where the cached file is located should be stored.

However, I am not seeing an option in Nginx Memcached module to fetch just a key value and use that in a "if" statement.

For example:

Incoming request asks for /static/file1

And in the Memcached database, the file1 location (backend peer) can be indicated by the key 'static_'+$memuri

So, in nginx, you can set $memcached_key to be 'static_'+$memuri

However, the fetched value of the key is not available for other uses, unless " memcached_pass 127.0.0.1:11211 ".

Anyway, I have thought about one way to do this with nginx. Use " if -f filename" to check if the request file exists in the local file system. If yes, go ahead and serve the file. If not, invoke a backend script to fetch the file from original server, and store it in the local cache. However, the problem is what program you can use to stream the data to nginx while storing it to the hard drive. You do not want to download twice, right? Anyway, an expiration scheme also needs to be in place to prevent the cache from going too big.

Best,

-Liang

On 5/9/07, Cliff Wells <clif...@public.gmane.org> wrote: