Cache warming authenticated sites with XMLRPC

This video talks through how XMLRPC Page Load and HTTPRL Spider can be used to warm caches on private / authenticated sites. XMLRPC Page Load provides a callback that tricks Drupal into thinking that it’s delivering a page to certain user account. It does this by simulating page delivery but then never actually writing the output anywhere. What it does instead is just return if it completed.

This allows you to hook it up to crontab via httprl spider and simulate a ceratin user account accessing every page on your site. This can be used to warm the caches on sites that are locked away behind authentication systems so that you can rebuild caches on whatever interval you want.

There’s also a (crazy) command in HTTPRL called huss (not shown) that will simulate every user hitting every page; effectively getting full cache coverage on something like an authcache enabled site.