[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] W3TC and WordPress multi-site

Thanks Celina and robnalexpress for your reponses.

@robnalexpress, quick questions about your installation

– Are you using “page cache”. If so, are cached files (starting with “_”) being stored in the pgcache directory? where exactly? under w3tc-xxxxx/pgcache where xxx is the internal name of your site?

– How many .htaccess files do you have? Did you have to add the special lines in the document root .htaccess file or you had to create more files under different directories?

Thanks a lot for your help.

@robnalexpress, thanks for your response again.

So you will have n+1 .htaccess files (one for the root directory and one for each site). And you need to copy the content manually or does the plugin do it for you? I mean, what if you do not have access to the file system as you are working only through the WP interface?

Last question about .htaccess … you mention that you need to copy the “browser cache” config to the .htaccess, but how about the “page cache” config. Do you need to copy it to each .htaccess as well or only to the documentroot file? According to the “plugin interface” when I install it, it says I need to copy it to the root .htaccess. Unfortuantely when I do so nothing happens.

I’m not testing the browser cache yet. My problem is with the “page cache” as files are not being generated under each pgcache directory.

Thanks again for your help and support

Hi robnalexpress, thanks for your quick response again.

I do have access to the file system, but I would like the design team, who does not have access to the file system, to enable/disable the W3TC plugin. If they need to ask me for some changes in each individual .htaccess file … it would be pretty slow. I know other plugins manage .htaccess changes by themselves. But anyway .. I can deal with it.

Anyway, what I still do not have very clear is where I should put the “page cache” configuration changes: (a) in the .htaccess file in the document root or (b) in each individual .htaccess files (under pgacache/ dirs). I’m adding them to the document root file but no cached files are being generated in the pgcache dir. The plugin says it’s properly configured, but it’s not caching anything and it always access to the database.

Thanks again for your help

Thanks robnalexpress. I’ll do more testing then.

So far, I haven’t work that much with .haccess individual files under pgache dirs. The plugin never told me there were missing lines in these files. It did notice me, however, the changes in the document root .htaccess file were missing.

Not sure I checked that. What I did was some jmeter tests and realized there was no improvement whatsoever.
In the apache logs I also checked that the response time was the same as before (when there was no cache).

In individual installations (not multisite), I realized the WT3C plugin created cached pages in the wp-content/w3tc/pgcache dir. All files where being cached there with the prefix _. Example

_index.html
_index.html.gzip

As I understand, wordpress would use either the gzip version or the normal one depending on the http-header of the request.

Jmeter response times and apache log files showed 80% improvement when using W3TC plugin. If I delete the pgcache/* files, the first request goes to database and lasts much longer.

This is why I’m focusing in the cached files generation.