We use Contentful's webhook for triggering an external build process. Every now and then we notice, when this webhook is fired after publishing content changes, these changes are not visible after the build is finished. In these cases we have to start the process manually which fixes the issue.
According to Contentful, since the delivery API is powered by a CDN, it takes some time (up to 5 minutes) to reflect changes.
Is it possible to flush/invalidate the content first before downloading the content from Contentful. Or is the content available through another url i.o. cdn.contentful.com and give me the 'original' content?
There's no way to flush the caches faster, because that process is already in progress after changing your content — it simply takes some time.
What you could do, is using the Content Management API to fetch the content, but you have to keep two things in mind:
There's a much stricter rate limit in place for the CMA
You will also receive unpublished content when using the CMA
The CMA also has only limited querying capabilities, see https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/content-management-api/#/reference for the full documentation.
Related
I tried caching an information link by using the Spotfire Analyst caching option in Information Designer,
have set the timer to 7200s and don't have an validation query.
Unfortunately when I try to open/import the data it still tries to load them from scratch.
I know that for the first time, you need to wait for the data to load but even after after the first when I try to load them again it still brings them from from scratch so I have to wait 4-5 minutes for 4GB of data to load.
I checked the Spotfire server logs and it seems that it uses the cache but I don't know why it takes so much time.
Is there anything I can do to figure out what's happening?
Sometimes this is because the settings in the server configuration tool, for the Attachment Manager, are left at default, which limits the overall time period and the total amount of storage the caching can consume on the server. I find these values too low and increase them substantially.
I know there are upper limits on file size when it comes to media, but i'm testing with small images.
If i change a page, a simple content changed, the scheduled task syncs the change and i can see the update on the target server. If i upload an image to the media library, it doesn't sync via the scheduled tasks. I can sync it manually though.
I've read through the documentation, and didn't see anything where media files wouldn't sync, just the exact opposite though.
So what am i missing to get media files to sync?
It's beacuse the scheduled task synchronizes only page changes. You cannot use the default Content synchronization task to synchronize other objects.
But you can use event handlers and some API to synchronize any type of staging task.
https://docs.kentico.com/display/K9/Automatically+synchronizing+staging+and+integration+tasks
we are evaluating Azure right now and I really like the azure web sites, especially because of the very easy and fast deployment, which is helpful in our current situation where we make a lot of tests.
We have some in-memory-caches for information that is accessed very often per request like text-strings for multi-language-support and configuration settings edited by the site administrator. I would like to have a system where each instance of the web site has a copy of this cached data, but i need to send flush-events for cache invalidation to all instances when some settings are changed by the administrator. I guess that the azure service bus is perfect for this with the publish-subscribe-model, but I dont want to pay 3€ per instance just for sending some messages around.
Is there an option to open an individuell endpoint per instance, where I can a wcf-service for example?
This is no good way to direct a request at a specific instance of a Windows Azure Web Site that I'm aware of. The load balancer for Web Sites is defaulted to use sticky sessions (which you can turn off), but there isn't a way to force the request going in to be directed to once instance of a web site over another.
You could look at the Service Bus as you mentioned with a Topic and several subscriptions, which is indeed an option, but as you point out it does cost something. I'm interested in where you got the calculation for the amount though. Brokered messaging is charged per message (with "empty requests also being included"). If you had an instance checking once a minute for a month it's only about 43,000 calls. You can get 1 million calls for a US Dollar. With the long polling that Service Bus has in the managed client you end up with fewer "empty" calls than standard polling.
Another option is to simply use a different polling mechanism. In this case you are just wanting an indicator that you should, or should not flush the cache. You could put a text file in BLOB storage that contains a cache current version value. This could be whatever you want, a number, a guid, doesn't matter. Each instance would then from time to time check this BLOB file. If the value in the file is different than what they last saw they refresh their cache. Then they hold on to the new cache version value for their next call. You can either set this up as a WebJob on a schedule or do your own background polling.
Finally, there is the Windows Azure Cache Service (preview) which is usable by Web Sites, but that would cost additional and, if you really are caching the exact data on all instances, wouldn't be as efficient. It would give you the ability to deal with the cache service directly though, independent of the instances that are using it, allowing you to reset and such as you needed, on demand, in one fell swoop.
Personally I'd suggest taking a look at the Service Bus again.
Pardon my ignorance but I have a few questions that I can not seem to get the answers by searching here or google. These questions will seem completely dumb but I honestly need help with them.
On my Azure website portal I have a few things I am curious of.
How does CPU-Time apply to my website? I am unaware how I am using CPU unless this applies to hosting some type of application? I am using this "site" as a form to submit data to my database.
What exactly does "data out" mean? I am allowed 165mb per day.
What exactly is file system storage? Is this the actual space available on my Azure server to store my project and any other things I might directly host on it?
Last question is, how does memory usage apply in this scenario as well? I am allowed 1024mb per hour.
I know what CPU-Time is in desktop computing as well as memory usage but I am not exactly sure how this applies to my website. I do not know how I will be able to project if I will go over any of these limits so that I can upgrade my site.
How does CPU-Time apply to my website? I am unaware how I am using CPU
unless this applies to hosting some type of application? I am using
this "site" as a form to submit data to my database.
This is CPU time used by your code. If you use a WebSite project (in ASP.NET) you may want to do PreCompilation for your WebSite proejct before deploying to Azure Website (read about PreCompilations here). Compiling your code is one side of the things. Rest is executing your code. Each web request that goes to a server handler/mapper/controller/aspx page/etc. uses some CPU time. Especially writing to database and so on. All these actions count toward CPU time.
But how exactly the CPU time is measured, it is not documented.
What exactly does "data out" mean? I am allowed 165mb per day.
Every single HTTP request to your site generates a response. All the data that goes out from your website is counted as "data out". Basically all and any data that goes out of the Data Center where your WebSite is located counts as data out. This also includes any outgoing HTTP/Web Request your code might be performing against remote sources. This also is the Data that goes out if you are using Azure SQL Database that is not in the same Data Center as your WebSite.
What exactly is file system storage? Is this the actual space
available on my Azure server to store my project and any other things
I might directly host on it?
Exactly - your project + anything you upload to it (if you allow for example file uploads) + server logs.
Last question is, how does memory usage apply in this scenario as
well? I am allowed 1024mb per hour.
Memory is same as CPU cycles. However my guess is that this is much easier to gauge. Your application lives in its own .NET App Domain (check this SO question on AppDomain). It is relatively easy to measure memory usage for the App Domain.
I am experiencing a really curious problem with a HttpHandler and I am hoping someobody here might be able to shed light on this. Many thanks in advance for reading this.
We have created a HttpHandler that sits in the pipeline of an IIS website that serves images, videos, and other assets. The HttpHandler is very lightweight. Its sole purpose is to check if the media asset requested exists on disk and, if it does not, to re-write the URL for the asset to a location where the asset does exist. The handler has been created in this way to allow us to migrate our media assets into a new folder structure. We also plan to use the handler (which I will refer to as the URLRewriter from here on) for SEO on image and video URLs.
As mentioned, the URLRewriter class is very lightweight. We have run memory profiling over it and determined that it only consumes about 12B of memory while running. However, when we put the handler into the IIS pipeline we see some strange behaviour that ultimately results in a large amount of memory consumption and, invariably, that the w3 worker process recycles. The behaviour we see is this:
When a request comes in for an image on http://www.ourimageserver.com/media/a/b/c/d/image1xxl.jpg (not an actual URL) we notice that W3WP.exe creates, and hangs on to, a handle for every single folder in the path to the image:
• /media
• /media/a
• /media/a/b
• /media/a/b/c
• /media/a/b/c/d
This is a big problem because we have hundreds of thousands of media assets that are stored in a very wide and very deep folder structure. The number of handles created by IIS/W3WP grows rapidly when the URLRewriter is deployed to our production environment, and the memory consumption of W3WP goes up correspondingly. Within less than an hour of running (at a relatively quiet period in terms of traffic) the number of handles held by W3WP was in excess of 22000 and the process died. We also noticed that the kernel memory usage had increased on the servers where the URLRewriter was deployed.
Careful inspection of W3WP’s behaviour using Process Explorer and Process Monitor (both with and without a VS debugger attached) have revealed that the handles are created before the URLRewriter is called. In fact, the handles are created before the BeginRequest event is fired. When the URLRewriter is removed from the pipeline none of these handles are created. Now, a really curious thing is that it appears that the handles are created as result of a NotifyChangeDirectory operation carried out by W3WP. Why would W3WP request to be notified for changes to these directories? And how can we prevent it from doing so? Surely this is not default/normal behaviour?
If you have any ideas as to what might be causing this problem I would be most grateful for your input. The behaviour is the same on IIS6 and IIS7.