Hi,
Boost is working fine for the pages that are already on disk. The problem is that the first time you visit a page it might take like 5 (up to 8) seconds to generate it, as the drupal caching seems to be hidden by Boost module.

For example, check a few pages in here:
http://ibc.lynxeds.com/family/penguins-spheniscidae
Click on a name from the list (whatever) and check if you are cached (looking at the source). Then, check a different name and you will quickly know what I mean.

Before installing Boost, the average time for a page was 2 or 3 seconds. Now I have pages that requires up to 8 seconds, and if you request a page that is on the cache then only 1 second.
I'm not sure if I should keep using Boost or switch back to the drupal internal database cache (although some pages are now faster for a while).

Is there any alternative or way to use the drupal db cache AND boost?

Any suggestions are welcome!
Thanks!

Comments

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented

6.x supports using both database & boost, although I'm very skeptical that boost would cause such a huge difference in page load times, unless you have a very very slow hard drive since it waits for the file to be written before page gets sent.

You can crawl pages on a cron run. It takes me about 2 hrs to do 2k pages on $5 a month shared hosting. Code for that is located in this thread, should work for 5.x as well.
#363077: Add spider to crawler - Cache entire site with new install.

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented

ps
#454652: Looking for a co-maintainer - 5.x

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented

Looking at your site, it's taking over 2 seconds to delver a static html file. Try turning off server side gzip, it could be making it go super slow. Bug your host, try to find out why it's so slow.

You can try some alts here
http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897

ferrangil’s picture

ferrangil commented

I enabled gzipping content yesterday, as the server needed too much time for static files (I'm in Spain, server is in theUS, but anyway...).
Server is dedicated 2xquad, 4 Gb ram so that is not the problem. 22 visitors now, 6 logged in.
I just patched boost to don't use symlinks. Reenabling now...

ferrangil’s picture

ferrangil commented

Gzip disabled, similar speed from here... boost not generating symlinks working just fine.
I'm a bit confused with cache-control headers, which I tried to set to cache static jpg and other files to the users broswer, instead of downloading again and again at each page request.
I'll try to help for 5.x issues, but I don't think I can be a co-mantainer (not yet, unfortunatelly)

Pre-caching script looks interesting. I'll try it asap. Can't move to d6 yet.

Any extra suggestion will be welcomed! Thanks Mike!

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented

Another thread
#185075: Only apply "do not cache" headers to files inside the the cache folder.

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Closing all 5.x issues; will only reevaluate if someone steps up #454652: Looking for a co-maintainer - 5.x

Reason is 6.x has 10x as many users as 5.x; also last 5.x dev was over a year ago. The 5.x issue queue needs to go.