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In the realm of website performance optimization, two significant issues have come to our attention regarding the functionality of the W3 Total Cache plugin. These concerns have been observed both in controlled test environments and across a spectrum of our websites and customers of our ISP..
1. It appears that W3 Total Cache does not respect the ‘Expires header lifetime’ value. This is set to 1 year, but the cache is cleared within 24 hours. I have observed this phenomenon both in my test environment and with all our customers. Unless I’m missing something, this looks like a bug. I couldn’t find any relevant information about this on the W3 Total Cache forum.
2. When a cache expires, W3 Total Cache adds “_old” to the file name. Then these files should be cleaned by the WordPress cron (pgcache_cleanup), but this does not happen. Even when I run this cron manually, no cleanup is performed. This problem also occurs with other customers of ours, leaving many old cache files behind.
Hello Micha,
Thank you for reaching out and I am happy to help.
This is not a bug in W3 Total Cache, and there are a lot of factors when it comes to the cache refresh and cache purging.
The ‘Expires header lifetime’ value is the Browser Cache value – header.
_old files are created when the cache is purged.
It’s fine to have _old files. If you always have only _old files – that’s a sign something purges the cache all the time. Like theme or some plugin.
Depending on the configuration in Performance>Page Cache>Purge policy, the cache can be purged once the content is updated or a new article is created.
As mentioned above, some plugins or themes may call the purge of the cache if they are using the filter that exists in the W3 Total Cache.
To be safe, please check your Purge log in Performance>General settings>Debug>PageCache purge log and see what is calling the cache purge.
Thanks!
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