File system optimizations (ext3)

Question

I have a PHP application that for every request loads 1 ini file, and at least 10 PHP files.

As these same files are loaded for every single request I thought about mounting them on a ram disk but I have been told that the linux filing system (ext3) will basically cache them in some way that a ram disk would not improve performance.

Can anyone verify this and possibly explain what is actually happening?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

The virtual file system of (not only) linux uses a cache for virtually every filesystem. So yes, that's in place for ext3, too.
But you might be interested in something like apc which stores the byte/intermediate code for php's zend engine in memory.