To trigger cache hits for many pages with expensive load times, just create a rake task to iteratively send web requests to all record/url combinations within your site. (Here is one implementation)
Iteratively Net::HTTP
request all site URL/records:
To only visit every page, you can run a nightly Rake task to make sure that early morning users still have a snappy page with refreshed content.
lib/tasks/visit_every_page.rake:
namespace :visit_every_page do
include Net
include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
task :specializations => :environment do
puts "Visiting specializations..."
Specialization.all.sort{ |a,b| a.id <=> b.id }.each do |s|
begin
puts "Specialization #{s.id}"
City.all.sort{ |a,b| a.id <=> b.id }.each do |c|
puts "Specialization City #{c.id}"
Net::HTTP.get( URI("http://#{APP_CONFIG[:domain]}/specialties/#{s.id}/#{s.token}/refresh_city_cache/#{c.id}.js") )
end
Division.all.sort{ |a,b| a.id <=> b.id }.each do |d|
puts "Specialization Division #{d.id}"
Net::HTTP.get( URI("http://#{APP_CONFIG[:domain]}/specialties/#{s.id}/#{s.token}/refresh_division_cache/#{d.id}.js") )
end
end
end
end
# The following methods are defined to fake out the ActionController
# requirements of the Rails cache
def cache_store
ActionController::Base.cache_store
end
def self.benchmark( *params )
yield
end
def cache_configured?
true
end
end
(If you want to directly include cache expiration/recaching into this task, check out this implementation.)
via a Custom Controller Action:
If you need to bypass user authentication restrictions to get to your pages, and/or you don't want to screw up (too badly) your website's tracking analytics, you can create a custom controller action for hitting cache digests that use tokens to bypass authentication:
app/controllers/specializations.rb:
class SpecializationsController < ApplicationController
...
before_filter :check_token, :only => [:refresh_cache, :refresh_city_cache, :refresh_division_cache]
skip_authorization_check :only => [:refresh_cache, :refresh_city_cache, :refresh_division_cache]
...
def refresh_cache
@specialization = Specialization.find(params[:id])
@feedback = FeedbackItem.new
render :show, :layout => 'ajax'
end
def refresh_city_cache
@specialization = Specialization.find(params[:id])
@city = City.find(params[:city_id])
render 'refresh_city.js'
end
def refresh_division_cache
@specialization = Specialization.find(params[:id])
@division = Division.find(params[:division_id])
render 'refresh_division.js'
end
end
Our custom controller action renders the views of other expensive to load pages, causing cache hits to those pages. E.g. refresh_cache
renders the same view page & data as controller#show, so requests to refresh_cache
will warm up the same cache digests as controller#show for those records.
Security Note:
For security reasons, I recommend before providing access to any custom refresh_cache
controller request that you pass in a token and check it to make sure that it corresponds with a unique token for that record. Matching URL tokens to database records before providing access (as seen above) is trivial because your Rake task has access to the unique tokens of each record -- just pass the record's token in with each request.
tl;dr:
To trigger thousands of site URL's/cache digests, create a rake task to iteratively request every record/url combination in your site. You can bypass your app's user authentication restrictions for this task by creating a a custom controller action that authenticates access via tokens instead.