Hi @mpbraendle,
For the moment, I’d strongly recommend finding a way to host your PHP and database on the same server. I recognize that the number of connections required for a page load is extremely high, but it has not been a performance bottleneck for users in 99% of hosting scenarios and so it hasn’t been a priority to optimize it.
With regards to caching we are in the middle of a fairly major rewrite in 3.3 and 3.4 of our storage back-end, to move it from MySQLi under ADODB to PDO under Laravel’s query builder. We’re in the process of removing dependencies on our long-standing homemade caching toolset, in order to replace it with Laravel caches or Stash (see Replace homebrew caching library with 3rd-party caching library · Issue #3304 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub). Once this is done we’ll have a lot of additional options, but these are large code migrations and will take a few releases to complete.
In other words, we are moving towards what you propose, but it’ll take longer than your current time horizon if you’re currently suffering performance issues. You’ll need to host PHP and MySQL on the same box for now.
Further investigation and proposals are of course welcome!
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team