So, tomster.org is back again... kind of... After lots of experimenting with CacheFu and the Firefox plugin HTTP LiveHeaders and looking at my Apache logs I finally found out, what could have been the cause for the dismal performance of this site:

• tomster.org currently has an average of ca. 3900 pageviews per day
• 25% of which are for for my atom or rss feeds
• none of which ever returned a 304 Not Modified Code!

So, essentially this instance was busy generating the same old xml files ca. 1000 times per day, that factually only changed every couple of days *cough* weeks... Ouch!

But having narrowed down the problem, I was now able to take measures. After a bit of RTFM (CacheFu's that is) and looking at its control panel I found the solution: I had to add the feed-ids to the list of cacheable templates, like so:



This was possible, because the site-product for tomster.org provides its own ZPT-templates for the atom feeds which take precedence over the atom.xml Five view that Quills' basesyndication Product provides. Because sadly, I haven't found a way (yet) how to make Five views cachable -- which is why the RSS feed of this site is still being (re-)generated for every request. Luckily, 80% of feed views access the atom feeds and not the RSS.

So, if anybody has any idea on how to make CacheFu cache Five views, please speak up!

While I was playing around with CacheFu I added the WeblogEntry content type to its 'content rule' and Weblog and WeblogArchive to its 'container rule' -- with the result that also the front page is now able to return 304s.

Now, the way I understand it, this won't speed up access for first-time visitors at all, but clicking back and forth on tomster.org has become noticably snappier -- and, of course, all those feedreaders out there, will only retrieve a feed if it's actually changed.

I hope, we can sort this out for the Five views, though -- or else any Quills instance could quickly turn a plonesite into a snail -- and we don't want that...