We’ve pushed out the revised Practices and Materials navigation, these can be seen here :
These navigation sections use the ‘tag search’ component of the site, e.g. to find anything on the site tagged with ‘crochet’ you would visit :
http://www.folksy.com/all/Crochet
These views now employ ‘caching’. This means we store the page displayed to the user for a period of time, and then generate a new page after that time period has expired, this reduces the ‘load’ on the site as it means these pages don’t have to be created ‘on the fly’ for every request. This means that there can be a delay between an item being listed and it appearing in the ‘Crochet’ view for example. We’re currently caching these pages for two hours so we can ensure the reintroduction of this functionality doesn’t adversely affect the site performance. We’ll be monitoring the site closely today and if there are no issues, we’ll be reducing the caching time to thirty minutes tomorrow morning. We’ll continue to monitor the site performance and adjust the caching time as appropriate to ensure site stability.
Moving forwards we’ll be looking to improve site performance by employing caching across the site over the next few weeks. This will use different methods to determine the length of time we cache pages, based on the different page usage profiles. In many cases this will be transparent to the end user with no delay between items being listed and them appearing on an index page.