Wordpress How to use cron to load sitemap file?

Cloudflare CDN cache doesn't guarantee asset says in cache if there is no or very little request traffic for them. But 1hr should be fine.

You really don't want to cache sitemaps too long especially if you have active updates and changes to site maps. Cloudflare cache is per data center so such cronjobs will only populate cache for CF datacenter closest to your server location which won't help the 200+ other CF datacenter located visitors or crawlers that may visit your site and hit a cache miss anyway. So if your server is in Los Angeles and you run cronjob, then US West coast Cloudflare datacenters may get a cache populated request. But then if you're in New York and check the file, it maybe a cache miss as Cloudflare US East datacenters may not have populated the cache for that file.

You can check if the file is cached via SSH commands on server, run wget command first manually and then do a curl header check in SSH for it too

Code (Text):

wget -O - -q -t 1 https://mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Code (Text):

curl -Ik https://mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

that will check the Cloudflare datacenter nearest to your server.

Cloudflare Enterprise plans though do have Cache Prefetching from all 200+ Cloudflare datacenters to populate the caches and Enterprise plans have Argo tiered cache enabled by default so middle CF datacenters can ask as a middle origin proxy so other CF datacenters can lookup from those middle CF datacenters if a request isn't in their datacenter's cache Does Cloudflare Do Prefetching?

But if you don't have Cloudflare Enterprise, if you need to populate more Cloudflare datacenter caches, you would need to do the cache pre-warm populating from many servers geographically spread out over the internet. I do this for some Cloudflare non-Enterprise sites as I have 32+ VPS servers from many cities already apart of my centminmod.com cluster so I use those to pre-warm my caches. I also use Cloudflare Enterprise plan to do cache prefetch.

 

Yeah it would be wasted to just for cache pre-warming alone. For me the cost is already fixed as I have working site across all the VPS so it isn't costing me anything extra to add a cronjob to each VPS server.

For most folks this isn't required, as the cost of a cache miss is only for the first 200+ visitors each from each Cloudflare datacenter for first visit only. Second visit is cached.

 

Solve the problem rather than deal with the symptom = fix slow loading sitemap

 

Tried asking at WordPress.org Forums and Yoast/wordpress-seo ?

 

Very nice use of PHP-FPM fastcgi_cache based caching

 

You'd have to manually configure PHP-FPM fastcgi_cache and all the URL and cookie exclusions to prevent caching logged i member data. Centmin Mod 123.09beta01's centmin.sh menu option 22 Wordpress installer as PHP-FPM fastcgi_cache development testing support in private right now see Wordpress - Differences between Wordpress regular install vs centmin.sh menu option 22 install.

I demo'd Wordpress installer using PHP-FPM fastcgi_cache caching at https://blog.centminmod.com/2019/07/15/122/how-to-install-wordpress-on-centmin-mod-lemp-stack-guide/ when creating my blog for https://servermanager.guide/. But it's still in private testing as there are bugs and gotcha's not ready for prime time support by me.

From that blog write up

If you're using Cloudflare you can also cache sitemaps at Cloudflare CDN level too via page rules or Cloudflare Worker custom caching which is what I do on my forums and Wordpress site right now via Cloudflare Worker custom caching.

example

Code (Text):

curl -I https://blog.centminmod.com/sitemap_index.xml
HTTP/2 200 
date: Sun, 01 Nov 2020 08:18:04 GMT
content-type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
set-cookie: __cfduid=d9bfc938f6163f5a5efe16dea7020bf751604218684; expires=Tue, 01-Dec-20 08:18:04 GMT; path=/; domain=.centminmod.com; HttpOnly; SameSite=Lax
cf-ray: 5eb42eda4d03ca57-YUL
age: 7
cache-control: public, max-age=120
expires: Sun, 01 Nov 2020 08:20:04 GMT
link: <https://blog.centminmod.com/sitemap_index.xml>; rel="canonical"
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains;
vary: Accept-Encoding
cf-cache-status: HIT
cf-cachetime: 120
cf-req-country: CA
cf-request-id: 06247b9c6f0000ca57bd97f000000001
cf-tls: TLSv1.3
expect-ct: max-age=604800, report-uri="https://report-uri.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/beacon/expect-ct"
permissions-policy: accelerometer=(), camera=(), geolocation=(), gyroscope=(), magnetometer=(), microphone=(), payment=(), usb=()
pragma: public
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-powered-by: centminmod
x-robots-tag: noindex
x-ua-compatible: IE=edge
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
server: cloudflare

 

Cloudflare Worker won't be any different than Cloudflare page rules. Just with CF Worker I can set minimum cache TTL below 30 mins i.e. 120 seconds which page rules can't with CF Edge TTL min cache value not able to set that low unless you're on Cloudflare Enterprise which can then set down to 1 second if needed. CF Free min is 2hrs, Pro is 1hr and Business plan is 30 mins minimum.

I have Cloudflare free, pro, business and enterprise plan accounts. But with CF Worker I can do same caching regardless of CF plan type.

On Cloudflare Enterprise Edge Cache TTL can be set as low as 1 second