Is it okay to use a frequently invalidated server-side cache with APO?

[gavinsiver]

I manage hosting for a plethora of websites. One website (WordPress based) makes use of Comet Cache Pro, a WordPress caching plugin. This website serves paid content, which is ideally rotated on every page load; the real necessity for this content is frequent rotation. We also use a paid Cloudflare subscription to better optimize the content delivery from this website, including APO.

Wanting to maintain both the website’s performance (which does have heavy viewer volume) and its content rotation, we set Comet Cache to expire every cache file 15 minutes after creation. Knowing that Cloudflare’s APO creates its own cache in Workers KV and that the WordPress Cloudflare plugin monitors the WordPress installation for changes, does Comet Cache invalidating its cache so frequently invalidate the entire cache in APO? Would I be better served to only cache this site through APO?

This is running under the assumption that multi-tier caching is a good idea for APO; if I am wrong and should never use a WordPress caching plugin in combination with APO please let me know - I’m always trying to learn!

[yevgen]

Hi,

Server caching should work fine with APO, please make sure that you purge server cache after APO activation (verify that cf-edge-cache header is returned from the origin).
Server caching invalidation is independent from APO caching. To control APO caching duration you can specify Edge Cache TTL Page rule. Depending on the CF plan type the minimum caching time will vary from seconds (Ent) to hours (Free).