Time-of-day caching?

[António P. P. Almeida]

On 28 Fev 2011 19h53 WET, nginx-forum at nginx.us wrote:

> Quick note of intro: I'm certainly not a highly-experienced sys
> admin or developer -- more of a "gifted amateur" as a friend once
> called me :) Anyway:
>
> I have a large and fairly complex WordPress-based site that's become
> a lot more popular than expected, and is often close to maxing out
> my hardware. My challenge in optimizing the site is that all of the
> most popular pages/files are very time-sensitive -- they're updated
> at specific times of day, and are very heavily downloaded as soon as
> they're available. So: I need those pages/files to be flushed from
> the cache the moment they change, while everything else is cached
> more aggressively.

I'm not much of a WP guy, mostly Drupal ;), but I think that this WP
plugin can be of assistance in your quest:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nginx-proxy-cache-purge/

You need to install the cache purge 3rd party module:

https://github.com/FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge/

Note that this is a route that voids solutions like SuperCache. It's
more complex to setup, but ultimately much more flexible. 

> I haven't found a good solution for this with WordPress plug-ins
> such as SuperCache -- they seem to be too "all-or-nothing", flushing
> too much or too little.
>
> I've been tinkering with Nginx as a reverse proxy sitting in front
> of Apache. I'm getting very good results so far with regular
> caching, but I don't see a way to get that "time-based cache
> granularity" I need. But as I say, I'm no expert.
>
> Any thoughts? Thanks.

Since you're already using Nginx as a reverse proxy is a "natural"
fit.

No need to use Varnish.

My $.02
--- appa