With some experimentation, we've determined that it is not necessary for the site to function these days. There's no noticeable effect on p90 or p99 response times in the loggedout cache pool and several large traffic events have occurred while the pagecache was off. By removing this layer, we reduce complexity, remove a possible source of poisoning bugs, and make it easier to do stuff like logged out A/B experiments.
Reddit installer development instructions
This folder contains all of the installation scripts required to build reddit on a stock Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) box. Originally all of this was included in ../install-reddit.sh but the need to fork the image into an base installer for testing as well as a full installer for local use meant some reorganization and fracturing of the original script.
When making updates to any of these files, Travis will test out the minimal install in travis.sh but not the full install. Please test on a fresh VM, and preferably using a modified web-install instructions:
wget https://raw.github.com/$GITHUBUSER/reddit/$TESTBRANCH/install-reddit.sh
chmod +x install-reddit.sh
./install-reddit.sh
This will ensure that the installation is tested in the most basic installation scenario.
NOTE if you find yourself adding files to this folder, please update $NEEDED in ../install-reddit.sh to reflect the addition.