Click here to watch Tag, You're It! Keep Your Reverse-Proxy Cache Up-to-Date.

Accelerating your Drupal site with Varnish, Squid, or Nginx?  Check.
Expiring your content with Expire module?  Check.
Invalidating outdated pages with Purge module?  Check.
Tearing your hair out because you still don’t see that update you made?  Ugh . . . check!

There’s no doubt that reverse-proxy caches like Varnish can greatly improve the performance and scalability of a Drupal site. Unfortunately, we often configure our production environments in ways that allow some of our outdated content to persist even after it has been updated. Expire and Purge modules go a long way in reducing these kinds of issues, but sometimes they’re just not enough.

At Columbia Law School, we’ve synthesized and developed a silver bullet approach to maximize our use of Varnish while ensuring it always returns the most up-to-date Drupal content to the user. We tag it.

The session will cover:

Current reverse-proxy cache invalidation techniques and why they don’t work for some of us

Developments in building smarter caches
- Drupal 8
- Varnish Cache Tagging

HTTP Cache Tag Auto module
- A Drupal 7 module developed by Columbia Law School to solve the age old stale cache issue
- Automatically supports tagging and invalidating pages based on entities, menu items, theme, blocks, taxonomy terms, contexts, cache tag context reaction, views
- Provides Rules integration
- Provides hooks to allow other modules to add their own tags and respond to cache invalidation requests
- Provides sample reverse-proxy cache configuration files

Slides:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w76azqzyqdiq204/tag-youre-it.pdf