Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Problems with caching

[postman101]

Dear fellas,

Please help me solve the big and urgent problem I have.
My site runs relatively slow and I want to add chat to it

I do have this (as recommended by a friend) in my .htaccess because I want to be able to log all of the clicks on my site:

#NEVER CACHE
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php|cgi|pl)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 01 Dec 2003 16:00:00 GMT"
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, private, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

My site is relatively slow...and I would like to speed it up witouth loosing the benefit of being able to log all the clicks on the site.

How should I go about this problem...what i realized is that user avatars are not cached and because my site is a social networking site on some pages it has lots of avatar images.
Should I enable user avatar caching and/or do some other stuff? and if yes how should I enable user avatars but still be able to log all the users clicks?

I am running the site on a VPS server with 768MB RAM.

Thank you VERY much.

[NWSTech]

why would caching cause issues, most users browsers wont cache an entire page so they will still request a page anyway

[postman101]

Originally Posted by NWSTech

why would caching cause issues, most users browsers wont cache an entire page so they will still request a page anyway

I see. 98% of the pages of my site are .php
If I delete:
#NEVER CACHE
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php|cgi|pl)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 01 Dec 2003 16:00:00 GMT"
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, private, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

...would I still be able to log all (or at least 98% of all) URI requests?
Would removing those lines speed up my site significantly or is there something else in addition that I need to do?
I am not sure why users avatars are not cached...and what would I need to do to enable that...

[Steve_Arm]

About the avatars, if you output them with php i.e.: <img src="img.php?id=10" />
they will never cache.

Can you post the url to the site?

[postman101]

Originally Posted by Steve_Arm

About the avatars, if you output them with php i.e.: <img src="img.php?id=10" />
they will never cache.

Can you post the url to the site?

Steve, site is password-protected..but if you think it can help I can provide you with an account.

Links to images are: icon.php?id=19. So I guess there is no way to cache them?

Is there anything else I could do to speed up my site but to preserve logging of all URI's?

[Steve_Arm]

Yeah, that way they won't cache. Been there done that. Had to revert to plain image calls.
PM the url to take a look and an account.
How many queries run per page on average?