Advice To Improve Efficiency Of API Call And Cache - php

Question

So i have the following code:
private function getArtistInfo($artist){
$artisan = json_decode($artist, true);
$artistObj = array();
//fb($artist);
$artistObj['id'] = $artisan['name']['ids']['nameId'];
$memcache = new Memcached($artistObj['id']);
$artistCache = $memcache->getMemcache();
if($artistCache === false){
$artistObj['name'] = $artisan['name']['name'];
$artistObj['image'] = $artisan['name']['images'][0]['url'];
$initArtist = array('id' => $artistObj['id'], 'name' => $artistObj['name'], 'image' => $artistObj['image']);
$artistObj = $this->buildArtist($artisan, $artistObj);
$memcache->setMemcache($artistObj);
}
else{
$initArtist = array('id' => $artistCache['id'], 'name' => $artistCache['name'], 'image' => $artistCache['image']);
}
return $initArtist;
}
Now the code works but it takes getArtistInfo() too long to finish when i just want the $initArtist value; I would like my client to get right away the $initArtist once its constructed, and somehow let the caching of $artistObj runs in the background.
So far i have read up on several different topic i thought might be useful: event delegation, callback function, call_user_func, observer pattern, threading, gearman etc. However, I have no idea which one of them would actually do what i want. Please point me to the right direction.
EDIT:
My Memcached class:
class Memcached {
private static $MEMCACHED_HOST = "localhost";
private static $MEMCACHED_PORT = "11211";
private $id, $key, $memcache, $cacheOK;
function __construct ($id){
$this->id = $id;
$this->key = 'artistID_'. $this->id;
$this->memcache = new Memcache;
$this->cacheOK = $this->memcache->connect(Memcached::$MEMCACHED_HOST, Memcached::$MEMCACHED_PORT);
}
protected function getMemcache(){
$artistInfo = null;
if($this->cacheOK === true){
$artistInfo = $this->memcache->get($this->key);
}
if($artistInfo === false){
return false;
}
return $artistInfo;
}
public function setMemcache($artistInfo){
$this->memcache->set($this->key, $artistInfo, 0, 60);
}
}
My buildArtist() code:
private function buildArtist($artisan, $artistObj){
$artistObj['amgID'] = $artisan['name']['ids']['amgPopId'];
$discography = $artisan['name']['discography'];
foreach($discography as $album){
$albumID = $album['ids']['amgPopId'];
preg_match('/(\d+)/', $albumID, $matches);
$albumObj['amgAlbumID'] = $matches[1];
$albumObj['title'] = $album['title'];
$albumObj['releaseDate'] = $album['year'];
$albumObj['more'] = $this->getMoreMusic($albumObj['title'], $artistObj['name']);
$artistObj['discography'][] = $albumObj;
}
return $artistObj;
}

Answer 1

Well, it's not entirely clearly how long too long is, or which part of this code is what's slowing you down. For all we know, the slow part isn't the part that stores the data in Memcached.
In any case, once you do identify that this is your bottleneck, one thing you can do to accomplish this type of out of order execution is use a brokerless messaging queue like ZeroMQ to accept JSON object that need cached. A separate PHP script can then take on the job of processing and caching these requests asynchronously outside of any web-request. This separate script could be run through a cron-job or some other job manager that handles the caching part in parallel.

Answer 2

You want to use set and get rather than using the memcache persistence ID, i'm not even sure what setMemcache and getMemcache are but they aren't in the extension documentation.
Here's an example from the documentation:
<?php
$m = new Memcached();
$m->addServer('localhost', 11211);
if (!($ip = $m->get('ip_block'))) {
if ($m->getResultCode() == Memcached::RES_NOTFOUND) {
$ip = array();
$m->set('ip_block', $ip);
} else {
/* log error */
/* ... */
}
}
Please show the code of buildArtist for help on optimizing it.