[TYPO3-core] TCA, ext_tables.php and caching concept

[Tolleiv Nietsch]

Thanks, this comes far too late which left you fighting alone.

I didn't expect the "storm" in the other thread as well, but I also feel
that this way of "announcing" important changes isn't good.

Anyways - would still be great to have a consolidated common
testing-base for such performance critical things. This would make life
much easier for everyone and would maybe motivate others to help ;)

Cheers,
Tolleiv

Christian Kuhn schrieb:
> Hey.
> 
> First I'd like to thank Benni for his trust expressed with his latest
> mail in the thread!
> 
> I didn't expect such a shitstorm in the '30% slower' thread and it was
> my fault to not give a bigger overview of current work and ideas prior
> to pushing and merging the patch in question.
> We raised the topic at the extbase code sprint and realised we must give
> out more details on strategic things the active development group is
> working on, and the vision we share.
> 
> When refactoring bigger things, it is often not really clear how the
> final version will look like. We realised the TCA handling must be
> improved to gain speed and to make things easier for developers at the
> same time. With the first patches we got rid of some constructs that
> blocked us from doing things. Two weeks later, we now have a group of
> people aware of the full impact and the system oddities.
> 
> Our current concept boils down to:
> 
> * loadTCA(), includeTca() are deprecated, not used in core.
> 
> * Move all $TCA (ctrl+columns) of a specific table to
> ext:Configuration/TCA/'tablename'.php
> 
> * Deprecate ['ctrl']['dynamicConfigFile']
> 
> * First transparent cache level: Change bootstrap: On first access
> (caches empty), before loading ext_tables: Find all loaded extensions,
> find files in their Configuration/TCA folders, execute them (they will
> return an array with TCA config, filename is the tablename). This will
> build 'main' TCA. Cache the full result for next operation (cache_core).
> This operation will be done in all scopes (fe, be, ...). ext_tables.php
> *should* not include 'ctrl' sections of tables anymore, but they *can*,
> for compat reasons.
> 
> * In FE, caches cleared: Additionally to above, call all ext_tables, get
> result of full TCA and export to cache_core. Will be required on next
> call. This way, we have a *full* TCA in the frontend in all scopes,
> while not executing ext_tables on every call. ext_tables is not executed
> (like before) if this TCA cache entry exists.
> 
> * In BE: Use the 'Configuration/TCA' cache above, but always include
> ext_tables.php anyway (like before).
> 
> 
> We are confident this scheme will work out pretty well and gives
> backwards compatibility.
> 
> * The Configuration/TCA cache entry can be used every time in the
> backend, ext_tables.php will be smaller and takes less time to execute.
> A pre-compiled TCA array takes (nearly) zero time if loaded from disk
> with opcode cache.
> 
> * In frontend, full TCA will always be there, loaded in (nearly) zero
> time, just using some MB more memory, no DB call. Memory impact of some
> megabytes is ok.
> 
> * Transparent caching, no need for any developer to think about this
> sort of things if TCA files are located at the correct position.
> 
> * The ugly 'dynamicConfigFile' construct is gone.
> 
> 
> All in all we think that both frontend and backend performance will
> increase with this concept. Next patches to move TCA around will follow
> soon and after that the cache layers will be integrated. The whole thing
> is *must have* for 6.1, otherwise we will do some sort of roll-back.
> 
> 
> Regards
> Christian

-- 
Tolleiv Nietsch
TYPO3 Core Developer


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