FREE Magento full page cache warmer

wfpc relies on a sitemap.xml file; you can read how to generate one for your Magento site here. Once you have a sitemap generated (and an FPC configured), you're good to hit the site with the cache warmer.

wfpc has two modes of operation, the first is test mode. This randomly selects 10 URLs from your sitemap to load. An example

./wfpc -t http://mymagentosite.com/sitemap.xml

You'll see a fancy summary of your site's performance

Finished testing your Magento site performance
Total download time (in seconds)   : 5.0269110202789
Total download time (formatted)    : 0:0:5.026
Average page time (in milliseconds): 502.69110202789

To actually warm the FPC, use -w as the first argument. wfpc will fetch each URL listed in sitemap.xml synchronously.

The warmer will run an initial test, warm your entire site, then test again and report on performance gain

Finished warming your Magento site performance
Average page time (in milliseconds): 517.31648445129
Speedup is 75.07%

If you want to put a delay between requests, you can add a -d=delay-seconds after the -w argument. An example

./wfpc -w http://mymagentosite.com/sitemap.xml

./wfpc -w -d=1 http://mymagentosite.com/sitemap.xml

./wfpc -k -t https://192.169.1.234/sitemap.xml
./wfpc -k -w https://192.169.1.234/sitemap.xml

If you have a large site with a lot of URLs to warm, you might consider running wfpc within a screen session.

• Install and configure Varnish, that's the recommendation from Magento

• Lesti FPC is a free full page cache and it works well
• Make sure you have a reasonably high TTL for your FPC. If your pages expire from the FPC quickly, there's not much point to warming them all!
• Disk-based FPC caching seems practically just as beneficial as memory-based caching on SSD servers. Unless you really need too, you're probably better off only using memory to cache core Magento data and using the disk for your FPC.
• If you're using a memory-based store for your FPC like APC, Redis or Memcache, keep an eye on the usage of the store as your cache is warming. For example, if you have a large site you want to cache, you may overrun your cache storage limit if you're not careful!

• The script should run on Windows, but I haven't tested it there. You'll probably need to run it as php wfpc args... in that case.
• The script relies upon a few things in PHP
  • Filter extension
  • SimpleXML extension
  • allow_url_fopen = 1
• This script will actually work for any site that has a sitemap.xml file. If you have an FPC mechanism on a site running something other than Magento, you may still find the script useful!