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Server side caching performance issues

We have recently had a user report issues with new posts not showing up for him and I wanted to give a brief explanation as to what is happening.

For a long time the website was being slowed to a crawl because google and other search engines would just about hammer the website to a stop as they indexed the sites on the server. I enable server side caching of the websites as static pages to allow them to index the site without causing the database which the site is normally created from to get hammered. I think everyone will notice the the website is a bit faster in the last month or so. (when the server has been up 🙂

So what happens is that if you are not a registered member of the website and are not logged into the website/forum then you will get the static pages. If you log in you will get served up pages directly from the database. The static pages don’t update instantly so if your not logged in you might not see a new post on the forums for a few hours to a day or so. If you are logged in you will see new posts instantly as you will get the latest page from the database.

This was a compromise I had to make to still allow search engines to index the website so that people searching for Downeaster Yachts or other terms relative to our site to find us while still giving reasonable performance to our members.

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