Can’t use Preload in 1.10.0: button is missing!

Do you see the “Cancel Cache Preload” button there?

If you look at the source code of the page, do you see the “Preload Cache Now” text?

As mentioned in my original post, I do see both the “Save Settings” and “Cancel Cache Preload” buttons. Only the “Preload Cache Now” button is missing.

I have now checked the source code carefully, and there is no “Preload Cache Now” text.

Sorry, I missed that bit in your post. The plugin thinks it is still preloading. If you look in your wp-content/cache/ directory, do you see either of the files, “preload_permalink.txt” or “preload_mutex.tmp” ?

Delete them and preloading should get unstuck.

The files are owned by your web server, so you’ll need to run something like this in a PHP file, put it in mu-plugins and run on init:

unlink( ABSPATH . '/wp-content/cache/preload_permalink.txt' );

Same for “preload_mutex.tmp”.

In wp-content/cache/, the file “preload_permalink.txt” was present, but not “preload_mutex.tmp”.

I followed your suggestion and deleted “preload_permalink.txt” using my FileZilla FTP client. After logging out and in again, the “Preload Cache Now” was back. After initiating preload, I could see that the preload process was active via the new preload notification panel. Nice!

Preload seems to be working as it should. Thank you for your help!

PS: I don’t quite understand the last part of your message, regarding running a special command in a PHP file in mu-plugins etc. etc. Since manually deleting “preload_permalink.txt” seems to have resolved the issue, I assume I don’t have to implement the additional steps you mentioned?

That’s great it’s working again. I really need to add a “Force Stop!” button that deletes those files. Because of the way the preload works, the plugin relies on the preload job to delete it, but in rare cases that doesn’t happen.

Don’t worry about that PHP command. Sometimes the web server is a different user to the user you login to FTP with, so you can’t delete the files like you did. No need to do anything else.

FYI: Since I started using this plugin a few years ago, “preload_permalink.txt” has always been present. It has not caused any problems (until after I updated to 1.10.0).

Every month I manually delete the cache and initiate preloading. Previously, there was no notification panel, so I used FileZilla to check that my pages/posts were cached and that preloading had finished. The “preload_permalink.txt” file changed during each preload process, but it was always there.

Also now, after sucessfully running preload in 1.10.0, the “preload_permalink.txt” file is still there. And since the “Preload Cache Now” button is back, it appears the file is not causing any issues.

Thanks. We changed how the preload system works in the last release. One of those changes was in how the plugin detects if the preload is already active. Obviously, we’ll need to look at it again, as it’s not working 100% correctly.

We’ve run into the same issue on our site. I was able to unlock the preload by deleting preload_permalink.txt, and got the preload to run once and to show the timer. But since then it is now locked up again, and deleting the file no longer helps. Also, the cache preload refresh timer is being ignored. I always have it set to do a reload once a week, but it is doing it on a 24 hour timer instead.

@perfectword7 thanks. I’ll have to look into that.

Small update:

1. When activating the preload process manually using the button, the preload notification panel starts listing the four first preloads. Then the panel stops updating. However, the plugin is still preloading my pages and posts, which is good.
2. After preload finishes – which I carefully check using FileZilla – the preload notification panel still says it’s active.
3. In addition, preload is now roughly three times slower than before (i.e. prior to version 1.10.0). I have around 130 posts/pages/tags, and I know approximately how long the preload process has taken in the past.