Recently I tried to boost up the performance for one of my Joomla powered web site. So I enabled the System Cache plug-in through Plug-in Manager which is a separate tool from the regular Cache setting in Global Configuration. What does this cache plug-in do? In one simple sentence, this plug-in creates page-level cache files which can serve to the afterwards visitors to reduce the burden of calling database each time.
At the first few days, everything was working fine with some kind of performance gains on this Joomla site. Even at some times it caused mirror inconveniences when I was updating the contents or modules. I had to delete the cached pages to see my new changes. But I was still happy.
Till last week, some of my other web sites started to act weird. I could not upload new pictures, some of web sites threw the 500 Server error (see the below of an example):
“Error 500 – Internal server error
An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later.
By the way, I am using one of the premium package from 1and1 which has a files quota (the total files you can have in your package) even you did not use up your disk quota.
I checked further, and found out all the new added files (around 140,000 files) were generated by the Joomla System Cache Plug-in in these days.
I do not know why. Because I already set up the expiration day for the cache, but apparently all expired cache page files had not been deleted by the system automatically.
I asked the question above in Joomla LinkedIn group, but nobody could give me a good answer. One of them suggested check the directory permission, but I checked and the directory of /cache/page has the same permission as others (755).
Anyway, I had to manually delete all the files through SSH connection (using the command of rm –rf ) since the Joomla back-end admin interface would give you server 500 error with so many pages to be deleted.
But I do not want to manually delete these cache files every day. Gladly I found a good extension from Joomla JED which can help me delete the expired cache files automatically.
If you the same situation with System Cache plug in of Joomla, and you could not figure out why these expired page cache files could not be purged by this plug-in, you might need to try this extension as well.
This extension is called Auto Purge Cache Plug-in (current version is v1.1) which you can download from here.
To make it work, just simply Install it from the Joomla installer, and go to Plug-in Manager to active it. While you are enabling it, you can also configure its settings (like how often you need to conduct the auto purge).
SO far, so good. I will keep monitoring my file quota and report back if no other issues occurred.
Good luck to you with Joomla.
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