Purge takes 6 minutes after posting

Now the purge policy seems to have totally failed. New posting not visible after 20 minutes and home page still shows HTTP 304 Not Modified.

Sounds like a bug???

I actually have no clue what the fix is for this. I ended up opening a paid support ticket with W3 and they got the problem fixed in 3 business days.

It begs the question: are the W3TC policies too complex for a developer (or non-developer WordPress user) to tweak? I can’t believe it is, but I certainly didn’t have an extensive amount of time to research where to even start, or understand the effects of all the different settings and how they relate to each other.

They didn’t tell you anything about the fix?

I’m having the same issue, purge policy seems like it’s being ignored. Nothing is being purged when new posts are created or users post comments, I *think* it seems to be updating when it finally hits the “Maximum lifetime of cache objects” which is currently set to the default 3600 seconds. That’s obviously too long for a site that posts frequently and has many users posting comments.

Is there any harm in setting that much lower, maybe to 10 minutes, until I can figure out why the purge policy isn’t working?

No I didn’t get any insight into the main reason for the purge policy failure. I just got a generic response that implied “many settings needed to be tweaked”. The irony is that all my previous settings were blown away when I upgraded to the latest version. Lesson learned is to use the “download settings” option before upgrading.

I also thought there was some relationship between the Maximum Lifetime and the problems I was seeing. But I wasn’t so sure after I started seeing purge issues last up to 20 minutes or longer.

As far as your question about setting the Maximum Lifetime to a lower amount, I can only guess that you can experiment with it. And as long as you aren’t hosting a high-performance site it shouldn’t affect page load times.

I’m still mystified as to what some of these settings do and how the different settings affect each other.

On a final note, I had another forum posting asking about how to test these settings without creating false blog posts. I never got an answer on that post either. These seem like fundamental issues that some with significant WordPress admin experience could answer.