If you interact with any UC ANR blogs, you may have recently noticed some slight changes . First, the performance of the blog is a little faster, with pages served more quickly than before. Second, if you write for an ANR blog, your new posts will not appear  immediately after being submitted, but may be delayed for a few minutes.

Do not be alarmed!

Nothing is wrong, and as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the two changes in speed are actually connected.

The CSIT team has implemented a new "caching" functionality for the ANR blog system. A "cache" (pronounced like "cash" money) is the temporary storage of data in order for future requests for that data to be served faster. In other words, the ANR blog system now will cache (or temporarily store) certain data requests from site visitors and then serve those stored items much more quickly upon future requests. By keeping certain key items essentially "close at hand" the website can respond to a user much faster, and speed up page delivery significantly.

We implemented the new system partially for speed improvements, but also as a way to fight against spam traffic, which can severely degrade server performance. Caching helps to mitigate malicious traffic, but it does come at a cost. When site admins are uploading new posts to a blog, the caching can occasionally delay the publishing of a new blog post to SiteBuilder. The data in the cache only gets updated after an interval (usually less than 5 minutes), but if a blog post is submitted right after the latest update, you may have to wait a few minutes for it to show up in a SiteBuilder site.

The balance between speed, security and submission timing can be difficult, but caching allows CSIT to protect server load and speed up overall performance. So, have some patience when posting to your blog, even if it takes a bit longer than normal. At least your readers will get to your story that much faster after it has been published.