This week in caching: warming the cache before users do

This week in caching: warming the cache before users do
Three on pre-populating instead of waiting for the first cold visitor.
— sitemap-driven warmers — crawl your own sitemap.xml post-deploy so the first real user hits a warm edge; WP Rocket and most CDNs offer this.
— warm the long tail you actually have — feed access logs, not the homepage 100 times; warm the URLs people request. Obvious, rarely done.
— req.hash_always_miss / soft-purge-then-warm — refresh hot objects without an eviction gap so users never see a cold miss.
Bookmark: the "warm from access logs" pattern — it beats homepage-only warmers because it matches real demand, not assumed demand.