Hello,

I've built a news site using SimplePie to pull in a set of feeds and display them on a page. The caching is working but the problem is that the first initial load is slow. After that, you can hit refresh and it loads very quickly. I'd like to eliminate that first slow load by creating a cronjob, which is what I've heard many other people do. I'm very new to crons and programming in general so hopefully someone can help me understand this.

I found one example of a guy using the following cron to automatically visit his page and he syncronized the cache duration, thus eliminating any slow starts:

0,15,30,45 * * * * wget -q --spider http://thewebsite.com

*/15 * * * * curl --silent --compressed http://www.mysite.com/index.php

*/15 * * * * php /home/username/public_html/index.php

If you run the php command like that you will bypass the webserver so it may not be cached, it depends what type of chache you are using.

You probably have the "ab" apache benckmarking tool, you can pass a URL to it and it will load the page through the webserver.

Thanks for the fast response, Reborg.

I'm not sure what type of cache I'm using. Is there a quick way to find out? It's whatever is default when using SimplePie, because I haven't changed it.

Could you please describe how I might use the "ab" apache benckmarking tool? I have not heard of it before and would not know where to begin. If you could provide an example of how I would use that to pass the url through, I would really appreciate it. Again, thank you for the reply.