Methods for caching PHP objects to file?

Question

In ASPNET, I grew to love the Application and Cache stores. They're awesome. For the uninitiated, you can just throw your data-logic objects into them, and hey-presto, you only need query the database once for a bit of data.

By far one of the best ASPNET features, IMO.

I've since ditched Windows for Linux, and therefore PHP, Python and Ruby for webdev. I use PHP most because I dev several open source projects, all using PHP.

Needless to say, I've explored what PHP has to offer in terms of caching data-objects. So far I've played with:

1. Serializing to file (a pretty slow/expensive process)
2. Writing the data to file as JSON/XML/plaintext/etc (even slower for read ops)
3. Writing the data to file as pure PHP (the fastest read, but quite a convoluted write op)

I should stress now that I'm looking for a solution that doesn't rely on a third party app (eg memcached) as the apps are installed in all sorts of scenarios, most of which don't have install rights (eg: a cheap shared hosting account).

So back to what I'm doing now, is persisting to file secure? Rule 1 in production server security has always been disable file-writing, but I really don't see any way PHP could cache if it couldn't write. Are there any tips and/or tricks to boost the security?

Is there another persist-to-file method that I'm forgetting?

Are there any better methods of caching in "limited" environments?

Answer 1

Serializing is quite safe and commonly used. There is an alternative however, and that is to cache to memory. Check out memcached and APC, they're both free and highly performant. This article on different caching techniques in PHP might also be of interest.

Answer 2

Re: Is there another persist-to-file method that I'm forgetting?

It's of limited utility but if you have a particularly beefy database query you could write the serialized object back out to an indexed database table. You'd still have the overhead of a database query, but it would be a simple select as opposed to the beefy query.

Re: Is persisting to file secure? and cheap shared hosting account)

The sad fact is cheap shared hosting isn't secure. How much do you trust the 100,500, or 1000 other people who have access to your server? For historic and (ironically) security reasons, shared hosting environments have PHP/Apache running as a unprivileged user (with PHP running as an Apache module). The security rational here is if the world facing apache process gets compromised, the exploiters only have access to an unprivileged account that can't screw with important system files.

The bad part is, that means whenever you write to a file using PHP, the owner of that file is the same unprivileged Apache user. This is true for every user on the system, which means anyone has read and write access to the files. The theoretical hackers in the above scenario would also have access to the files.

There's also a persistent bad practice in PHP of giving a directory permissions of 777 to directories and files to enable the unprivileged apache user to write files out, and then leaving the directory or file in that state. That gives anyone on the system read/write access.

Finally, you may think obscurity saves you. "There's no way they can know where my secret cache files are", but you'd be wrong. Shared hosting sets up users in the same group, and most default file masks will give your group users read permission on files you create. SSH into your shared hosting account sometime, navigate up a directory, and you can usually start browsing through other users files on the system. This can be used to sniff out writable files.

The solutions aren't pretty. Some hosts will offer a CGI Wrapper that lets you run PHP as a CGI. The benefit here is PHP will run as the owner of the script, which means it will run as you instead of the unprivileged user. Problem averted! New Problem! Traditional CGI is slow as molasses in February.

There is FastCGI, but FastCGI is finicky and requires constant tuning. Not many shared hosts offer it. If you find one that does, chances are they'll have APC enabled, and may even be able to provide a mechanism for memcached.