It’s time to lift the veil of secrecy on my latest project. With help from friends who diligently tested and reported bugs on this I can now present version 0.1 of WP Super Cache!
It is an extensive modification of the famous WP-Cache 2 plugin by Ricardo Galli Granada. This plugin creates static html files that are served directly by the webserver as well as the usual WP-Cache data files. It also goes one step further fixing a couple of bugs, adding some hooks and new features and making WP-Cache more flexible.
From the plugin page, here are some of the major changes and updates:
- A plugin and hooks system. A common complaint with WP Cache was that hacking was required to make it work nicely with other plugins. Now you can take advantage of the simple plugin system built in to change how or when pages are cached. Use
do_cacheaction()andadd_cacheaction()like you would with WordPress hooks. Plugins can add their own options to the admin page too. - Works well with WordPress MU in VHOST or non-VHOST configuration. Each blog’s cache files are identified to improve performance.
- Normal WP-Cache files are now split in two. Meta files go in their own directory making it much faster to scan and update the cache.
- Includes this WP-Cache and protected posts fix.
- Automatically disable gzip compression in WordPress instead of dying.
- As Akismet and other spam fighting tools have improved, the cache will only be invalidated if a comment is definitely not spam.
If your server is struggling to cope with the traffic your site gets this plugin could be just right for you. If your site regularly gets hit by spikes of traffic like a digging or slashdotting it’s definitely the right choice, and even for everyday use, you may very well notice your webserver is a little bit more responsive.
I contacted Ricardo last week and sent him on an earlier copy of the plugin but I haven’t heard from him yet however. I’d love to know what he thinks of my modifications!
Update! this post has been dugg, please digg it and we can really test the cache out!
Nov 6th: WP Super Cache 0.2 is out! I think all the bugs mentioned below are now fixed. I applied Tummbler’s patch (from Elliott and Reiner) that enables gzip compression of the WP-Cache data files and fixes feed content types.
Please note: PHP’s internal zlib compression must be disabled for this to work. Look in your php.ini for the zlib.output_compression and zlib.output_compression_level directives and comment them out by placing a “;” at the start of each line.
Check the plugin page above for the download link.
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Okay…. Where’s PHP.INI?
I use cPanel here for my hosting and I was using the file manager and I cannot find PHP.INI
Before anyone laughing, I’m freakin’ new to this stuff… so, go easy on whitey…
-Chuck
donnie – it’s recreated and added back in when you install the new plugin.
Chuck – you probably don’t have access to it as it’s generally “root” who edits that. You can still use the plugin however, just disable compression. If PHP is already compressing things then that’s good too.
I’ll need to add another radio box and separate out super cache and wp-cache compression.
Donncha,
I still can’t seem to get any pages cached! Everything was done correctly…enabled…etc, but nothing is being cached by either cache method. Something is definitely wrong! Any ideas? I explained more in the comment I left a few mins ago.
Thanks
Aseem – have you updated your plugin since yesterday? Download the zip file from the page above and install that. Never mind that the version number on the WordPress.org page says 0.1, I messed up the readme file when I was making the release!
So, basically, you’re turning it into Movable Type? 🙂
Well done; I’m a little sick of waiting 20 seconds for any vaguely popular WordPress blog to load…
It was, the graphics on my template were not loading… I couldn’t figure out why… anyhow, I’ll just stick to Wp-Cache.
(RE: Windows linking stuff, it is apparently possible to produce a good approximation to symlinks on modern Windows. You do need a special tool from MS to do so, though, so it may not be too practical…)
I just installed the new version. It works fine. for one, I didn’t have my gzip compression turned on, on wordpress, because the old plug in said I had to disable it. So, I turned that on. and installed the new one, and it’s working great, compresson and all.. I also added said stuff to the .htaccess file as well. everything seems to be humming along now. 🙂
-CHuck
Chuck – that’s great, glad it works now!
Donncha,
Thanks for taking the time to create this plug-in. I tried installing it an hour ago and it asks me to set WP_CACHE to true, which I do. When I do that, my entire site disappears and loads (and reloads) blank. Any thoughts on that?
thanks!
Oh go on Robert, get the kick in 😉
You’re definitely being disingenuous to WordPress.
Not at all, not at all. I have found, however, that very popular WordPress blogs where the owner is using wp-cache but not some memcached magic are intolerably slow, in general…
I got news for you man, WordPress smokes Moveabletype’s Butt any day of the week. MoveableTypes doesn’t even acknowledge WordPress’s trackbacks for Christ’s sake!
Moveabletype is for idiots who have more money than common sense, give me wordpress any day of the week. Even if Matt is a butthead. 😛 :-O 😆
*shrug*
My MovableType blog must be special; it’s fine with WordPress trackbacks.
Seriously, though, Donncha, well done on this. It seems to remove the single biggest issue I had with WordPress, and what drove me away from it in the first place. Any chance of getting it in the distribution?
Ya know, I might be thinking of typepad or something, I’ve sent trackbacks to moveabletype blogs before, and they never showed up. I believe that with typepad, you have to send them too the proper place or something odd like that. With WordPress, you just have to reference the link in question and bam, it shows up. Or could have been the guy wasn’t accepting them. So, I could be wrong. 😀
Think I like about WordPress is, IT’S FREE! AND FREE IS VERY GOOD!
Especially for us poor white folk! 😉
Robert – thank you. No chance of it going into WordPress. As you can see from comments above, it doesn’t work on all servers. Cent OS servers in particular don’t like the compression code but I’ll fix that one way or another.
WordPress is getting much better caching now. The xcache plugin I linked to above is superb and comes very close in performance terms to the static file being served to anonymous users here. Ryan Boren is working on a caching module too, so WordPress 2.4 could be pretty sweet from that perspective.
Having a problem (I think). When I hit the Delete button on an expired cache page it deletes all of the cached pages.
I would not think this was expected behavior as each page has its own delete button.
Any info/suggestions?
Thanks.
Donncha,
Suggestion for next release.
the ability to list cache pages and Super cache pages. each have it’s own seperate button. 🙂
-Chuck
Awesome, I’ll run some tests on my dev. server to try it out.
WindowsObserver – you mean on the “List Files” part of the admin page? That’s something I haven’t looked at yet tbh. Thanks for reporting that.
Dreamhost didn’t like the Super Cache compression. It gives you weird characters when you have “super cache compression” enabled.
I’ve been using WP-CACHE for a while and have fund it to be a lifesaver when my site has a post go Digg popular. But even then, there are limits — if the traffic from Digg is too much the site still hangs…
The other issues fixed (gzip, etc) aren’t really of interest to me since really. The only thing of value is if the caching is actually faster.
Should I make the switch? Is it really a significant caching improvement? I’d hate to make the switch just to find that the caching itself is basically the same…
Deaf Musician – that would be PHP’s compression kicking in. Disable compression in the backend and it should work. Thanks for that!
Darn!!! Thank you for this… just one question: How can some portions of the static page still be kept dynamic using your plugin? I’ve been dying to get something where certain plugins I use can still be kept dynamic and not cached like: the Recent Comments Plugin, the wp-views plugin – the views plugin in particular, cache plugins are great but features like number of views of a post get massacred… is there a way to include some generic features where WP users can include such plugins not to be cached or cached until any change occurs (like views get changed etc.)
Oh yes, this post is on the front page of Digg.com and the server is barely ticking over. That said, it’s been a *very light* digg with only 2000 hits in the last hour and a bit.
Oz – you could now write plugins that clear the cache when your various dynamic plugins should be updated, or use Javascript to fill in the space on your page.
21st C – why not give it a go? It’s not as if you have to pay for it!
21st Century Citizen,
Yes, Yes and Yes.
Switch now, you’re Blog will love you for it. Just be SURE and follow the instructions!
I didn’t the first time and I had a problem. 🙄
But it works fine now!
-Chuck
Donncha, thanks. Unfortunately I’m not a programmer to understand what you just mentioned 😉 Is anyone working on integrating wp-views and recent comments plugin with Super Cache? It would be nice to see a step by step process for non-techie bloggers like me 🙂
I’m getting a nice little error…
Fatal error: Call to undefined function do_cacheaction() in /home/user/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php on line 172
any ideas?
Jonathan – symlink wp-content/advanced-cache.php to wp-cache-phase1.php if it’s not there. That error will hopefully only show once right?
I’ll wrap that in a function_exists() call for the next release. Thanks!
Can you give some hints as to exactly what “expire time” does and how we should determine what to set it to?
Donncha,
Seems like it already is..
user@domain.com [~/www/wp-content]# ls -la
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user user 72 Sep 24 17:17 advanced-cache.php -> /home/user/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php
Ah, I figured it out.
I removed the old file, refreshed a couple times, disabled, re-enabled, and now the error is gone.
Thanks!
Rob – expire time can be any time you want. Super Cache is set to 6 hours by default, but it all depends on how often you want dynamic elements of your site to update.
When you make a post or a comment is left the cache updates, but things like “latest comments” widgets won’t on every page.
I am a little confused about compression. In Options, should I be enabling compression? If so, do I need to comment out zlib in php.ini as indicated by this page (but NOT talked about at all in the README)? What’s the story?
sygyzy – Yes you should enable compression in the admin page, and yes you should remove it from php.ini
It’s not in the readme because that feature was updated this morning and I didn’t see that my photoblog, https://inphotos.org/ was displaying actual gzip content, and then it took me about 10 minutes to figure out it was PHP’s internal zlib compression. This site wasn’t affected because that wasn’t enabled. Unfortunately that was after I made the 0.2 release. I hope I can follow in a few days time with a minor 0.3 update with a corrected readme file.
Donncha,
I downloaded the latest version and uploaded it and STILL HAVE 0 CACHED PAGES!!! There is something really weird going on here. Any ideas on what this could be???
Thanks
Donncha,
I have not touched my php.ini and I have compression enabled and I don’t see anything broken. Is there any sort of debugging feature to see what’s going on behind the scenes? I will make the php.ini change like you said but I don’t see any ramifications without it. It certainly does not seem to be breaking the caching.
Thanks.
I’m not sure what I’m missing. I am using wordpressMU 1.3. I decided to install the plugin to the plugins folder to test, but when I go to the options page I can only see:
WP Super Cache Manager
Main options
and nothing else. No check boxes or error messages either on the screen or in the php error log. Also, none of the cache folders are created. Any ideas?
Thanks
Could I suggest something allong the lines of the following since very few people have their own box for wp or access therefore to php.ini.
http://blog.iloaf.com/2007/03/15/make-wordpress-quicker/
You’d need to add only 1 line to get the html parsed as php and tf compressed.
I installed the new version, but I still get ‘text/html’ on feeds, even with the flush() call added when trying to get the headers.
I really think the only sure way to fix it is going to be to check is_feed() in wp_cache_shutdown_callback(), like in my old patch:
http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2007/06/19/wp-cache-fix-for-content-type-in-feeds
However, don’t use that patch as-is, because yesterday I applied that to your code, and my testing turned up that the ‘feed’ query variable isn’t set in the default case (when a specific feed type of ‘rss’, ‘rss2’, or ‘atom’ isn’t requested). How about I just go ahead and submit a revised patch in the plugins trac?
Dougal – please do submit a patch!
I’ve tried the WP Super Cache, and all appeared to work smoothly until I viewed the site in IE 7 where I saw all sorts of “MySQL server has gone away” errors. I’m using WP 2.3.1. Any thoughts? Anyone else experience this issue?