Ideal settings for lifetime/garbage collection/preloading?

  • We’re using the Pro version of W3TC and using fragment caching because our site has a Woo-based store with some pages containing hundreds of items (but we need to keep things like the cart menu dynamic).

    Once the big pages have been cached they load very quickly, but often we revisit the site after some period of time and those pages load very slowly, as if they are not cached.

    Ideally these pages would always be cached unless a product is updated, at which point the page cache would immediately be regenerated. While the regeneration is occurring, we would rather see an older cached page than to ever have a state where there is no cached page at all.

    There are various settings both for fragment caching and for page caching that suggest they may have an effect on all this. Maximum lifetime of cache objects, garbage collection interval (in both places), default lifetime of cached fragments. Does this mean that if we have pages cached they might get flushed automatically and end up not being cached? How can we determine the optimum settings? I can’t find any documentation that suggests what affects what here.

    And there are the cache preload/priming settings – I _think_ this depends on having a good sitemap, which we need to tweak. I wonder why “preload the post cache upon publish events” is not checked – would we not want any changes to be preloaded into the cache? Also how does preloading work with the apparent clearing of cache objects noted in the previous paragraph?

    Thanks in advance!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter metricmedia

    (@metricmedia)

    It looks like Yoast no longer includes priority in its sitemaps:
    https://kb.yoast.com/kb/can-i-change-the-sitemap-priority/

    So how does this affect cache priming in W3TC:
    “A compliant sitemap can be used to specify the pages to maintain in the primed cache. Pages will be cached according to the priorities specified in the XML file.”

    If there are no priorities, will pages be preloaded at all? Is there a better sitemap tool to use than Yoast?

    Plugin Contributor gidomanders

    (@gidomanders)

    Since you paid for the pro version, you should ask these questions in the plugin support, not on the forum, but I’ll yet to answer your questions as good as possible.

    The cached pages have a lifetime, which means the page cache will be regenerated once the page is visited after it expired. Page cache priming prevents regeneration when a visitor requests the page, but you’ll have to use server cron jobs to achieve that. The WordPress cron can only run when someone visits the website.

    preload the post cache upon publish events should be enabled in your case, because you want the page cache to be regenerated when you change something. We disabled it per default, because it sometimes takes a while to save a post or page when that option is enabled.

    The sitemaps not having a priority doesn’t matter. The only downside could be that everything has the same priority now, which means all pages are being treated equally important to prime.

    I hope this answers your questions!

    Thread Starter metricmedia

    (@metricmedia)

    > Since you paid for the pro version, you should ask these questions in the plugin support, not on the forum, but I’ll yet to answer your questions as good as possible.

    Do you mean the support in the plugin, that requires another $250 per incident? I’d rather ask the community first. And is there not documentation for this plugin somewhere?

    > The cached pages have a lifetime, which means the page cache will be regenerated once the page is visited after it expired. Page cache priming prevents regeneration when a visitor requests the page, but you’ll have to use server cron jobs to achieve that. The WordPress cron can only run when someone visits the website.

    I have cache priming enabled, and yesterday I confirmed that our biggest page was cached (identified the actual cache file). I visited the site today and encountered another long delay waiting for it to display. When it finally did I see that the cache file has been updated to today – so apparently having priming enabled does not prevent regeneration, or else there is some other setting that needs to be made to make it work properly. Do I need to extend the expiration to something really big, like a year?

    We can definitely configure server cron jobs to do what is necessary. What cron job(s) should we create to force the cache to prime?

    Again, happy to refer to documentation if it is available – please point me to it. And thank you for your help.

    Plugin Contributor gidomanders

    (@gidomanders)

    We have an FAQ here: https://github.com/Auctollo/w3-total-cache/wiki/FAQ

    The delay is caused by the building of cache. The priming is normally done by WordPress event scheduling, which can only fire when the website is visited. That’s why I advised to use server cron. You only have to set it up to visit your website every once in a while. Then the cron will fire the event to rebuild the cache. That’s the easiest way. There’s also a possibility to manually prime the pages. I’ll explain that if you want to use that.

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    Since you paid for the pro version, you should ask these questions in the plugin support, not on the forum, but I’ll yet to answer your questions as good as possible.

    Sorry, but customers cannot be supported here. Doing so is not fair to authors who play by the rules.

    For pro or commercial product support please contact the author directly on their site. This includes any pre-sales topics as well.

    As the author is aware, commercial products are not supported in these forums. I am sure they will have no problem supporting you there.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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