Authcache personalisation

Thanks for your reply! (sorry for not replying earlier)

We're gathering information about the user and this gets sent to AWS for storage by way of an api. On every page load, this gets done and the call returns the current info about the current user, which we can use that pageview for personalisation.

I will look into xhprof. I also thought that there must be a bottleneck somewhere, because un-cached pages should not take 5+ seconds to get rendered. Hopefully xhprof wil shed some light on the issue.
If drupal speeds up to normal, i can test with more realistic loadtimes.

When i got the above working properly, i will look into the fragments. Maybe we'll choose a middel road for now and cache whole pages with authcache, one for every "type" of user we define. This would require custom groups to be created in authcache, but i think this should be possible.

Sorry to dreg this up again, but i've managed to make some progress. We've looked into the personalisations we want and concluded that caching entire pages with keys based on some of our own variables (with hook_authcache_key_properties) would suffice.

So we've succesfully implemented authcache on the live site of the client and everything works smooth and quick, for both authorized users as anonymous users. The next step was to implement our own logic to the authcache key with hook_authcache_key_properties sowe could create different caches for different groups of people. Neat!

But here comes the but; the whole cache key generation, whilst cool for logged in users, is totally bypassed for anonymous users. After rooting around in the code of authcache i found that for anon users, authcache_backend_anonymous_key() is used for key generation, totally skipping any custom changes to the cache keys. The only way to alter keys for anon users is by supplying a custom key generator, but this generator must be placed in the settings.php file. On that moment, my custom personalisation module for drupal hasn't loaded yet so i don't have the properties of the current user at my disposal for use in the key.

I can imagine this all was done for a reason, but for my case where i want to change content for anon users, this prehibits me from implementing my sollution.

I can hack the module ofcourse, but this is not something i want to do. Is there a chance a hook can be added for anon cache keys just like the way it is done for authorized users? I get the userdata from an external source on hook_boot() so i have all the information for forming a key at the time of hook_init().

Thnx in advance

Thanks for your reply.

I've tested the sequence of the loaded modules and the data i need for the personalised key is available the moment authcache runs for authenticated users, so calculating a cache key with my variables isn't a problem.

Am i correct in assuming that the cache key calculations for an authenticated user and an anonymous user are done at different times during a pageview? Because for authenticated users, there is a hook available, but for anon users, there isn't. So the problem is that the whole hook system isn't initialized yet when the cache key for an anon user is calculated, is this correct?

If not, and all keys are calculated on hook_init(), then i don't see why there couldn't be a hook to alter the keys for an anon user. Is this only for performance reasons?

The only thing, besides altering the authcache module, which i don't want to do, is to alter my code to work with the key generator function in settings and let that function get the variables for the current user, and use them to calculate the cache key.
I'm reluctant to do this, because using a hook, like i do for authenticated users, is way more neat.