Was talking to John Mitchell of Snapsis (www.snapsis.com) today, as I just realized the function of the 'Page-Param' setting in the Pageblaster config file.

In a nutshell, it seems like adding 'asg' (for Active Social groups querystring value) and 'asuid' (for Active Social user id) to the page-param of Pageblaster's config file will be a good idea for performance:

< pageBlaster
        page-param="tabid;asuid;aff;asg"

(the 'aff' is for the base Active Forums parameter).

What this setting means is this:

Wiith the default setting of just 'tabid', everytime a page that is unique just in tabid reaches the end of the Pageblaster caching memory or disk limit, all content under that tab will get recycled.  Imagine if you had a tabid that was your single Active Social user page, and it had 300,000 members underneath it. Every time a single sub-page under that tabid was forced into a refresh, -all- those sub-tabs would need to be regenerated.

By adding 'asuid', 'aff', 'asg', you are telling Pageblaster to create a unique subfolder for those querystring parameters. You do not want to go to far with this, for example my original intention was to add a 'fileid' parameter to represent my single product pages- this would be overkill because as John says "the cleanup will have to recurse folders and files and each request will have to do more work to make sure the cached page goes in the correct folder"

Hope this helps those tuning things up with Pageblaster.



      

Thanks for the tip!

I do the same to threads, and also to other modules such as Ventrian PA. For AF, I think it's afv and aft, can't remember for sure w/o looking.......

I had also thought to do the thread querystrings too, but after talking with John it seems you do not want to go that granular with it. For example if you had a bunch of product category tabs, with thousands of sub-product querystring "pages" underneath each category, it would not be the best performance tradeoff to include the specific product querystring value in page-params, because it would be generating a folder in the PB cache for each product, which means a lot of recursion.


John has his own page-param for Active Forums on Snapsis set to only the "aff". Probably a good idea to start with that, measure results, then try adding sub-levels like specific threads and see how it goes.

I use:
asuid;uid;aff;asg;aft;afv;afpgj;afpg;afnp
for Active Forums & Active Social.

Thanks for sharing, does using all those parameters seem to work out ok? Have you done any A/B testing on it? I'd like to use as many as possible but don't want to run up the I/O cycles (or whatever else the resource suck could be)

Posted By Zymm on 06 Jul 2009 10:18 AM
Thanks for sharing, does using all those parameters seem to work out ok? Have you done any A/B testing on it? I'd like to use as many as possible but don't want to run up the I/O cycles (or whatever else the resource suck could be)

I didn't do any specific benchmarking, but I quickly found that using just aff was not working; it was leaving too many stale pages in the cache, and therefore needed to be more granular--down to the forum and individual topic level. 

In fact, even with the topic (aft) in the pageblaster parameters, it can still cache a little too aggressively in some cases (e.g., when the #nnnn is also a parameter).  But I'm willing to live with that, given the performance benefit provided by pageblaster.

Great thanks, I will give it a try.