Today’s tidbit is probably one of the most active topics over on the Community Server forums:  “I post content on my CS installation but it takes 10 minutes or more to show up…how do I get it to show up immediately?”  One of the great features of asp.net is that you can cache data on the web server to avoid making costly trips to your database server, and CS aggressively uses caching to improve performance.  The caveat of this is that end users won’t have the most up to date data on your site.  The setting for this isn’t the most intuitive thing to find as it’s not configurable via the CS Control Panel, it’s located in your communityserver.config file in the <cacheFactor> element.  The default setting is 5; if you change this to 0 caching will basically be turned off and new content will be posted immediately.  Of course this will impact overall performance of your site as every request to your CS site will incur multiple database hits, so be sure to test everything out first.  For small sites, making this change shouldn’t affect performance too much, but for large sites that have a lot of traffic it isn’t recommended to lower the cacheFactor value unless your users absolutely need the most up to date content every time they visit.

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Posted Fri, Jun 9 2006 4:55 PM by Jayson Knight