X3Photo Gallery Forums

I am not sure how to diagnose this, but you won't get cached outputs served directly from X3 if something changed. I checked your page header output, and it includes these headers: As you are already aware, you are using Varnish, and I would be surprised if it was not Varnish that cached your pages ... After all, that's what its for ... Varnish is really cool, but I don't see how your server is setup to automatically purge varnish cache when something changes in your X3. I would like to look into varnish-X3-compatibility myself one day.

I can only diagnose further if you provide panel access, but 99.99% sure it's varnish cache. It's not browser cache (browser doesnt generally cache page outputs unless instructed to do so from headers), and It's not Cloudflare either, because Cloudflare does not cache pages.

Testing your headers today, I see you are using Cloudflare PAGE-CACHING, which explains everything: I assume you setup this from the tutorial I posted? It was clearly mentioned that when using CF page-caching, although it makes your pages very fast, you will need to purge pages from the CF cache after updating them. Did you enter your Cloudflare credentials into the settings->panel, so that you get the Cloudflare purge cache options?

Im surprised that you have gone through the relatively technical and substantial (but worthwhile) process of setting up Cloudflare page-caching, yet you were not aware that cloudflare was then caching your pages.

A multi-level cache setup like that may work very well, but it would require you to stay very conscious of all caching mechanisms when you want pages refreshed. X3 page-caching, X3 site Object, Apache varnish, Cloudflare, are basically all doing some form of cache, all layered on top of each other. The X3 page-cache is automated, as it will output new page if something changed ... The Site Object (if you are using preload feature), is NOT automatic, and you need to re-create it from panel after something changed. Then you have Varnish and Cloudflare, which will cache outputs of BOTH pages and the site object in front of X3 ....

You can pretty much be certain it was related to either Cloudflare or Varnish. I use Cloudflare, but I am not familiar with Varnish. Sounds like a labyrinth of caching though if you had both. Even if you cleared cloudflare, it would then pull a new page, and if that page was cached by varnish, cloudflare would have a new outdated page. Then if you refreshed your varnish, that would still mean cloudflare had an old page. You would literally need to purge caches simultaneously, in the right order ...