New EE Addon: Purge
I knew I loved Varnish Cache when it transformed an ExpressionEngine template’s load time from 9 seconds1 down to 23 milliseconds, and made it capable of 700 hits per second. A page that would previously bring my server to its knees if accessed too many times in succession was now being served effortlessly.
Well, this is awesome, I thought. I’ll just set the time-to-live for objects in the cache to like 1000 hours. But the problem is if we make a change in the backend, it won’t show up until that 1000-hour TTL is over. So I need a way to automatically purge all objects out of this site when something in the CMS is updated. Enter Purge.
Purge will send a purge request to Varnish whenever an entry is submitted, edited or deleted. There is even a link in the control panel to manually send a purge request, in case you change a category label and need the change to show on the front end.
So if you use Varnish and EE (I think there’s 4 of us), let me know how it works for you and let me know of any issues or suggestions via the GitHub page.
- There are many bottlenecks to check when diagnosing poor ExpressionEngine performance, but unfortunately there was no getting around some complex relationships we needed. ↩