Technical Solution

Simple script to pre-warm boost cache on a small site

Anoop John | | 1 min read

Boost is a module that allows for static caching on a Drupal site for improving performance for anonymous users. You can read more about how to install and configure boost here. Boost comes with a boost crawler that can crawl your site and refresh the boost cache. Here is a simple script that can be used to refresh the boost cache without enabling the boost crawler.


#!/bin/bash

#usage: refresh-boost-cache.sh www.example.com lastnid

nid=$2
last_nid_file=$1.txt

if [ -e $last_nid_file ];
then
  nid=$((`cat $last_nid_file`));
  echo "Read $nid from file"
fi

while [ $nid -gt 0 ]
do
  #echo "loading $nid"
  wget -O - -q -t 1 "http://$1/node/$nid" > /dev/null
  if [ "$last_nid_file" != "" ];
  then
    echo $nid > $last_nid_file
  fi
  #echo "$? returned"
  nid=$[$nid-1]
  sleep 5
done

 

You can save this file as refresh-boost-cache.sh in your home folder and add a cron job in your machine to run this script once every N days where N is the boost expiry set. You can increase the speed of this script by decreasing the time the script sleeps between requests in the penultimate line of the script. Do however note that decreasing the sleep time could have an adverse effect on the load on the server.

 

 

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