Support

August 20, 2012 at 12:06 pm

I have heard that the caching plugins such as WP Super Cache take up a lot of resources. We usually offload all of our images, scripts, css files, etc to Amazon Cloudfront. That usually helps with some of the page load times better than most caching plugins.

August 21, 2012 at 2:32 pm

I don’t use WP Super Cache or W3Total Cache or any of those “big” caching plugins anymore. That’s not to say you should avoid caching altogether. I find that those kind of “all in one” caching plugins often cause more problems than they solve because they activate a bunch of things that may or may not be optimal for your hosting environment. The reason why caching plugins interfere with Event Espresso is because we aren’t creating static pages and the caching plugins may not know to update/refresh the cache when a new event is created (which just means you may need to flush it manually) but a lot of plugins are doing a lot more than just creating cached pages. As such, this is what I do for speed/caching:

QuickCache for caching — the only thing this plugin does is create cached versions of all your pages on the site to save on the database hits caused when you try to access a particular page without any caching enabled. I have not yet heard of or seen a specific conflict with Event Espresso and QuickCache and it seems to work wonders.

Better WordPress Minify — many of those all-in-one caching plugins add minifying functions, but occasionally those cause issues with javascripts you are trying to load via plugins or in your theme. BWP will minify your js and css and consolidate them into one file (each) which can speed up your page load time.

Any time on any site where you are submitting information/writing data to your database at the volume you are looking at, it’s going to cause significant drain on server resources even in an optimized environment. Sites that do thousands of requests simultaneously are either on a dedicated server (or an array of dedicated servers) or using some kind of cloud-based hosting to distribute the load across many machines. If HostGator says you need a more powerful VPS for your next event to support the traffic spike, I’d go with their recommendation.

August 21, 2012 at 4:15 pm

I’ve never had to mess with the settings, but if you wanted/needed to exclude anything, I’d exclude the Event Espresso pages (so the event-registration page, registration-cancelled page, transactions page and the thank-you page).

August 21, 2012 at 8:55 pm

Hi Dave,

We do not see this in our testing. Is this something that is happening on your site right now?

August 22, 2012 at 9:45 am

I can do some testing today to double-check but no, this isn’t something I’ve ever seen. Moreover, for what QuickCache does (which integrates with built-in WordPress caching functionality), I don’t see any reason why it would cause issues. I’ll let you know if I find anything different.

August 23, 2012 at 10:46 am

3600 / 60 == 60 minutes, so that would flush the cache once an hour. Depending on how frequently you post updates, new events, etc, you may or may not want to adjust that to be longer between expiration times (which would lessen the server load when it’s doing the flushing, which could be handy during peak times).