A cache that had never worked.
One unset flag meant every page except the front page was re-rendered on every request while its cache file sat unused on disk; spot-checking the homepage made the cache look healthy for months. Two plugins wrote competing Cache-Control headers, so the CDN stored nothing. And the database was six times larger than its content.
- Copies written onto 2,520 post revisions
- ~645,000
- Everything else
- ~48,000
Infrastructure, database, front end, then security.
Mid-project the site was compromised through an unrelated route; both environments were rebuilt from clean sources within a day and the work continued on the rebuilt platform. The bars show roughly how much of the uncached homepage render time was left after each step.
Served from the edge in 56 milliseconds.
From Madrid or from the US, the homepage comes from the nearest edge in about 50 ms with no origin round trip, paints in 136 ms and is fully loaded in 450 ms. The database is 26 MB instead of 183, the deploy pipeline works again, and a monitor reports cache health on a schedule.