• I’m hoping that people can help me determine the best preload settings to use, and explain in more detail how it works, so that I can set the options that are appropriate for me.

    Can anyone please explain the benefits and, importantly, the costs of using the Preload option with WP Super Cache?

    Since all of the pages on a website eventually get cached even without using Preloading, please explain the benefits of using it, exactly?

    The costs of using it are, at least, spikes in server usage, while the new preload files are being generated.

    We also have problems with spikes in RAM memory on our site. Does the preloading use a lot of RAM? Does “garbage collection” use a lot of RAM?

    In what situations are those costs likely to be worth it, in order to gain the benefits? In what situations are they likely to be too high, and greater than the benefits?

    How does the “Refresh preload cache files every [ ] minutes…” setting relate to how fresh the content is on dynamic pages (such as a homepage which pulls content from other pages or outside sources) and of widgets which generate dynamic content? Does the preload time determine how often a dynamic, but not directly edited, homepage is updated? Will that type of homepage ever get updated if Preload is not used?

    What criteria should I use to set the number of minutes for preloading?

    How does/should my preload setting effect my garbage collection setting?

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  • I used to experience the similar issue. In my case the preload never cached all the pages. For some reasons the preload process could freeze on any moment. But all the rest worked well, so it made cache page when you open it directly via a browser. So I decided to “open” all the pages “manually” on a regular basis.

    Of course I do not want to do it by myself so I use cron schedule on my web server and a wget program.

    – I switched of the Preload completelly (“WP Super Cache Settings” -> “Preload@ -> “Refresh preloaded cache files every” ->0)
    – prepared bash file “mysite_cache.sh” that executes the following code

    rm -rf /tmp/mysite_cache_update
    wget -r -l0 -o /tmp/log_cache_update -P /tmp/mysite_cache_update -X /wp-content,/wp-json,/wp-includes,/feed http://mysite.com/

    – and configured cron schedule that executes the bash once a day after midnight.

    I beleive you can use the same approach and do the preload “manyally” whenever you want.

    Thread Starter hommealone

    (@hommealone)

    There are lots of “tutorials” online about settings for WP Super Cache, but every one that I’ve found simply gives the settings that the author chose; they don’t explain how the settings work, and how to determine the best setting option for your own particular situation.

    If anyone knows of a good tutorial that covers all of the settings in depth, I’d love to know about it…

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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