W3 Total Cache, but not its Page Caching with BuddyPress.
Hey Paul, cheers for that link. W3 looks like the most comprehensive cache plugin I have seen.
So it obviously won’t try and cache BP pages with them being dynamic? Is there much of a setup to it or is it just a case of installing it and letting it do it’s thing. Not infront of my computer so can’t download it to test right now that’s all. 
W3 Total Cache looks interesting. Am I seeing it right that essentially W3 Total Cache essentially is a plugin to be able to implement a CDN? Does anyone know the cost of a CDN using W3 total cache?
Check out Amazon’s S3 site for pricing and details:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
W3 Total Cache is very powerful; implementing a CDN is just one of the features.
@r-a-y have you used Amazon’s S3 service?
maybe I’m too stupid & can’t be bothered in reading endless boring documentation, but still can’t figure their services out…
There’s also this Codex page that has some useful advice for improving performance.
I am using WP Super Cache on a BuddyPress installation right now, but it is not caching any of the BuddyPress or bbPress pages — only the blog. This actually does help a lot because it is the blog that gets a lot of search and direct traffic. WPSC is a great idea that works really well for pages that aren’t *too* dynamic, like a blog. It stores static versions of the pages so that they don’t have to be rebuilt all the time. Site response for a new visitor that hasn’t logged in is improved massively.
But for a very dynamic site (e.g. with activity lists updating frequently) you really need db object caching in memory (e.g. memcache) to speed things up and reduce the load on the db. I think this is what W3 Total Cache does, but I don’t (yet) have experience with it.
Andy also wrote this page on other optimization options: https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/improving-performance/
I’m using it right now, and there are a couple, very weird and very specific issues. If you do either of these actions, your cache will get wiped out:
1) Edit your BP profile
2) Send a PM
Other than that, I haven’t found any issues! You can change your notification settings and you can post to the ‘wire’ without a problem, but those two things kill the whole cache every time.
So far, I have the following set to never cache:
wp-.*.php
index.php
activity
register
profile
groups
I had issues with W3 total cache and the DB caching. So far I’ve not needed it, though.
