A magazine where publishing one article uncached the homepage for 8 minutes
An online magazine's editors published 40 times a day. Each publish triggered a path-based purge of the homepage, all section pages, and the article — but the purge propagated POP-by-POP over roughly 90 seconds, and during that window readers in different regions saw inconsistent states. Worse, the homepage cold-started everywhere at once, spiking origin latency to 1.4s for several minutes.
The purge was global and synchronous when it needed to be surgical.
What we changed: switched to tag-based soft purge — the homepage was marked stale, not deleted, so it kept serving instantly while revalidating in the background. Only the new article's exact URL got a hard purge.
Post-publish homepage latency stayed flat at 90ms instead of spiking to 1.4s. Readers never saw a blank or stale-headline homepage. Origin load during the publishing peak dropped 34%.
The number that mattered: homepage publish-spike 1.4s to 90ms.
Edge of Glory
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A magazine where publishing one article uncached the homepage for 8 minutes
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