Purging

[Michael Loftis]

--On Thursday, October 14, 2010 5:32 PM -0500 Alan Gutierrez 
<alan at prettyrobots.com> wrote:

>   When you have an application that generates content, that you update
> infrequently, like pages in a CMS, how do you handle the case of the
> displaying the changes to the infrequent quickly?
>
> Do you set a short cache duration and then make it even shorter when
> authors are making changes to pages?
>
> Or do you wait until save and purge the cache entry for that particular
> page?
>
> I'm sure this is a FAQ and I've seen bits and pieces of answers. A
> pointer or keyword search suggestions would be great.

The answer is, "it depends" :)

For most things I do I keep only about a 5 minute cache, so its usually not 
too critical to force it to expire.  For the cases it is I either have the 
CMS do a PURGE, or allow PURGEs to happen from specific clients (either via 
a http PURGE command or SHIFT+RELOAD).

That's just me though probably.