[bigiain]

Can I suggest that if you've got problems including "stalls for tens of seconds on disk reads" you are almost certainly better off directing available resources towards fixing your hosting problems, rather than going down the cache rabbit hole on a hosting platform that's not really suitable for production use?

(With caveats for zero resource projects of course, but even for those I strongly suspect for many people paying $5 or $10 per month for "less crap hosting" is probably a better solution that prematurely optimising by adding caching and all it's inherent complexity to a fundamentally broken platform)

[thrownaway2424]

There's nothing you or I can do about the trend. They put more and more cores into a machine and the same number of disks (current-model Xeon servers have 72 threads and 1 or 2 disks), which guarantees that, at some point, the disk is highly oversubscribed.

[bigiain]

Sure - the "race to the bottom" for hosting prices inevitably means there's going to be options like GoDaddy offering "a year's worth of webhosting for $5" which clusters 400 WordPress and Drupal sites onto a single RaspberryPi or similar, but you don't _have_ to go there.

I can understand if you're an open source developer who gets paid in Uzbeki Som or Nigerian Naira, the calculation of "do I spend a day or two putting caching in place" versus "do I spend an extra $50 or $100 per year on hosting" might lean very much the other way, but I suspect for the vast majority of HN readers, the prudent approach is "pay a hundred or two dollars a year for hosting before bothering to implement complex caching strategies".