bert.beukema

Hey,

we’re not getting enormous traffic, but we do get an enormous slowdown without cache. The problem with cache is that is also caches things like reviews on products (we’re using Woocommerce). So when we receive new reviews, they won’t show in the site (because it’s cached). Another problem is with some of our widgets (such as the Simple Share buttons), which will go out of sync and then disappear from the site. These functions can’t be discovered by the caching module as no page / product / message / etc is actually updated within the system.

This is why we have to purge the cache every 8 hours or so, to ensure all data is displayed correctly. But, as traffic is not enormous anytime we purge the cache the site will become very slow to load. We’ve already had complaints about this from customers and it can be a valid reason for shoppers to simply leave the site (as it’s too slow for them).

As you can see, there is more then simply pages for which a cache warmer would be useful. Many caching engines have such a function, it’s easy to implement because it’s just a crawler.

Regards,

Bert

Hi guys,

both of you are correct, but our site is just too bloody slow without cache (there is a server delay on dynamic pages > 12 seconds where nobody seems to understand where it’s coming from). So for our site to actually function reasonably we need the caching system (it’s 1,97 seconds served from cache).

Bert

Hey guys,

I think that cache lifetime wouldn’t be a problem if the cache could be rebuilt. Generally a crawler would take about 5 – 10 minutes to recache a site, so that’s fine. The problem mostly stems from purging the cache, after which any cache-less site would perform much worse for a much longer period of time. And customers would be served uncached pages, which is bad for conversion (obviously).

Another option would be to have the cache engine accept certain hooks or scripts to instruct it to not cache certain (shortcode) elements / widgets or fragments.

Just my 2 cents.

Bert

Thanks guys, hope i’ve been helpful! For now i’ll just reset the cache at 1 day, the only problem with that is that the caching engine doesn’t automatically renew the cache. So for some time customers will have a slow(er) site.

Regards,

Bert

Hi David,

no it’s only for cached pages for non logged in users. Haven’t heard anything from the plugin developer on this topic yet unfortunately. But it seems at some point the caching engine goes out of sync, which in turn creates this behavior.

Bert

Hi there,

yes it’s a strange thing. We’ve purged the cache and now it’s working again. However, it was working when the old cache was in place, but after some time it stopped working. It’s only an issue when the site is served for non-logged in users as these sessions are cached.

So at some point I guess something is going wrong in the ajax loading.

Regards,

Bert

Hmmm, okay. Next question: do you know of a ‘cache warmer’ script that will play nicely with your plugin?

Regards,

Bert

Hi there,

unfortunately it’s not open source, but if you mail me directly @ [email protected] I can give you access to our FTP / WC installation. It’s just a bunch of php / css files and some database tables, nothing special. But it seems to be that it doesn’t actually update the product in question, so i’d need some other trigger to update cache.

Regards,

Bert

Hi Remco,

after a long search within the system we’ve found the culprit. We had installed a module called ‘custom order statuses’ to invoke a set of custom statuses. The problem with this module is that it has hardcoded WC statuses in it, which are incompatible with any language other then English.

I’ve been in contact with the developer but they are assholes who say they don’t have the time to comply to general coding standards and API standards of WC.

So we removed it and now it’s all back to nl_NL luckily.

Regards,

Bert

Hmmm, so instead of directly linking to categories in the main menu, you would create a page for each category. On that page you would pull the categories directly. But:

– How does this differ from the normal method?
– How would you restrict access (to pages?)

In our system on the left hand side we display the category menu (for navigation purposes) on every level (even product detail page level).

Oh, I’m talking about categories in Woocommerce, not the standard WordPress categories.