Page cache disabled 1+ year ago, cached pages appearing

  • Resolved metricmedia

    (@metricmedia)


    5 years, 5 months ago

    We installed W3TC on a site that is a combination WordPress + custom e-commerce solution. When the site went live we quickly established that page caching was caching the logged in “My Account” page (showing a particular user’s info) so we disabled page caching in W3TC. This was in April 2018. Suddenly today, customers start seeing the cached version of the “My Account” page. In WP’s cache/page_enhanced/ I found the My Account page, exactly as described.

    Question: with page caching disabled, why was WP delivering this cached page? Why suddenly now, after 18 months of no problems?

    I deleted the page_enhanced directory. It appears to have regenerated but is empty now. So the source of the problem has been eliminated. But the incident is troubling.

    Is this just because this is a “beta” plugin? I see that it’s only version 0.10.x.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    Hello @metricmedia

    Thank you for your inquiry an I am happy to answer.
    First of all W3 Total Cache is not a “Beta” plugin as it has 42 previous versions before this one.
    This all depends on the W3 Total Cache settings you used back in April 2018.
    There is a possibility that you haven’t checked “Don’t cache pages for logged in users” in Performance>Page cache and that’s why that page was cached. As the page was cached and might not have purged the cache, but just disabled Page Cache, it got stuck in the Browser Cache of some of the previous visitors. There is also a possibility that TTL was not specified so the page was served. If that page was expired it would have the _old extension and it would not be served to visitors.
    E.G. /yourwebsite/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/yourwebsite/somepage/_index_ssl.html_old
    I hope this answers your quesiton.

    Thread Starter metricmedia

    (@metricmedia)

    > There is a possibility that you haven’t checked “Don’t cache pages for logged in users” in Performance>Page cache and that’s why that page was cached.

    Actually it was cached because WordPress doesn’t know anything about logged in users in our e-commerce system – it’s separate from WordPress. That’s why we decided to disable page caching.

    > As the page was cached and might not have purged the cache, but just disabled Page Cache, it got stuck in the Browser Cache of some of the previous visitors.

    This sounds possible. We just find it strange that a year and a half went by, and suddenly we hear from four different customers today that they are getting the cached page.

    > First of all W3 Total Cache is not a “Beta” plugin as it has 42 previous versions before this one.

    Number of previous versions doesn’t equate to something being in beta or not. I am referring to the version number, which being “less than 1” suggests a not-ready-for-release application. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning.

    What is the thinking behind your version numbering?

    Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    Hello @metricmedia

    Yes, this is strange. Good thing that you’ve deleted the cache/page_enhanced/

    As for the plugin versioning. Let’s just say that it’s our developers’ little secret!
    Please let us know if you start experiencing the same/similar issue in the future.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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