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What is Umbraco warm-up?#
The Umbraco warm-up process entails preparing an application for optimal performance before serving live traffic.
This is particularly important when we experience a cold start, which can lead to slower response times when the app is accessed after being idle or newly deployed.
Warming up an app involves executing tasks that ensure all necessary components are fully operational and running efficiently.
Why use Background Job for Umbraco warm-up?#
Using a background job for warming up an Umbraco CMS is strategic because it prepares your application for peak performance without impacting the main thread's responsiveness.
This approach allows resource-intensive tasks, such as preloading content, compiling pages, and warming up cache, to be handled in the background.
By doing so, the main thread remains free to handle incoming user requests immediately, ensuring a smooth and fast user experience from the very start.
Alternatively, you can use the UmbracoApplicationStartedNotification handler to warm up a website, but you must be aware that this solution may not be efficient in some scenarios.
Introducing the Warm-Up Service#
The UmbracoWarmerHostedService operates by scheduling and executing a background task that pre-loads specified URLs of an Umbraco site.
It initiates a scope to access services that provide a list of URLs to warm up and a strategy to warm them up, typically by making HTTP requests to these URLs.
This ensures the site's pages are cached and ready for quick delivery to visitors.
The service logs the outcome of each warm-up attempt, allowing for monitoring and troubleshooting of the warm-up process.
Once the background job executes - you can expect a similar trace log:
The Core Interfaces: IUrlWarmupStrategy and IUrlWarmupProvider interfaces#
These define contracts for developing strategies to warm up URLs and for providing URLs to be warmed up, respectively.
Static and Dynamic URL Warm-Up#
The StaticUrlWarmupProvider allows for the specification of a predefined list of URLs to be preloaded, ideal for consistently crucial pages of your site.
Conversely, the DynamicUrlWarmupProvider dynamically generates URLs to warm up based on the Umbraco content types you need, adapting to site content changes.
This flexibility means you can easily switch between static and dynamic strategies based on your site's needs, ensuring optimal performance and user experience by keeping essential pages ready for immediate access.
To get all Url's for specific content types in Umbraco, you can implement a similiar helper:
Accelerating Umbraco with the UrlWarmupHttpClientStrategy#
The UrlWarmupHttpClientStrategy uses an HttpClient to send HTTP requests to URLs that need to be preloaded.
Key parameters include the HttpClient for making requests and a logger for tracking the outcome of each attempt.
The strategy sets a request timeout to avoid long waits and handle successful responses and failures.
Integrate Warm-Up Services in Umbraco#
You must configure an Umbraco application to use a warm-up service and dynamic and static URL providers. This is done within the Compose method.
The commented line shows how to switch to a static list of URLs by using the StaticUrlWarmupProvider.
Final Thoughts: Energizing Umbraco for Speed and Efficiency#
To make your Umbraco site fast and efficient, focus on warming it up.
Use dynamic and static content providers along with smart HTTP strategies.
By preloading content, you ensure your site is ready and performs at its best when users arrive.
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