Greetings, Missourinet staff, today we had some laggy performance on the site (in fact it was offline for about 20 minutes) due to a site-wide republish event which was triggered some time after 3 this morning. This clearing of all cached article data caused each request made to the site to require a rebuild of the article from the web site’s database. As you know, republishing a single page is a performance-intensive process which takes a few seconds to complete, as opposed to the normal instant response when viewing a page normally. With the clearing of all cache data, then, thousands of these requests were issued this morning, in rapid succession, grinding performance of the Missourinet site to a halt until we restored the old cache data.
On most Gestalt 2 web sites, the re-publish entire site button is a handy thing, as it lets you make sure all information is up to date. However, the definition of ‘entire’ for Missourinet constitutes tens of thousands of articles, linked by thousands of web sites, and indexed by every major search engine. Frankly when I wrote the original toolkit 10 years ago, I did not imagine it functioning at such a scale.
But, here we are, and so I have decided to disable this function for most users. If you click on the re-publish entire site link now, you’ll get a message telling you your account’s privileges are not sufficient. We have other ways in place to ensure articles are published, and we can’t really afford the performance hit that invoking this casually on this site causes. Please contact me or Steve Mays if you have questions.