Handle high traffic!

The most recent version of WP-Cache works pretty well. WordPress is pretty quick software and caches access to the MySQL database as it is. But with WP-Cache, pages that are normally created by the server on the fly are written to basically HTML files which can be brought up by future accesses to the same page. This reduces processor and database access load on the server. The main reason you may want to use this or even just activate it as needed is if you get linked by a very high-traffic site.

One problem I have with WP-Cache is that it does not like to work with the Theme Switcher plugin. There is one fix that kind of fixes it. Depending on the browser the person is using it just doesn’t always update when they switch the theme, until at least the next time they reopen their browser software. You need to edit the “wp-cache-phase1.php” file. Find this line:

if (preg_match("/^wordpress|^comment_author_email_/", $key)) {

and replace it with this line:

if (preg_match("/^wordpress|^wptheme|^comment_author_email_/", $key)) {

I run WP-Cache on all my WordPress installs, for my comic that has the Theme Switcher plugin I have it running but disabled, so I could just enable it in the event I got a surge of traffic for some reason.

Also it is good to turn the cache off while working on the template so that the changes are reflected and you are not looking at cached pages.