Only do purging every once in a while

[codeling]

Currently purging of old entries (#37, #54) is done on every request. It might be better to do it only once in a while, e.g. once a day or once a week.

[richardm75]

Agreed. As far as I can see purging old entries once a day will be perfect. Purging once a week sounds sufficient too if it is more convenient for implementation.

[codeling]

To change the interval is the least of effort here. The question is how to cache/store the time when the last purge was done. To my knowledge there is no simple key/value store in Joomla an extension can use, and using the plugin parameters for that seems wrong and would require some overkill (parsing JSON settings, changing it, writing it back).
Got an idea how to do that?

[richardm75]

I don't know about PHP features. But I usually solve the same problem in bash scripts by "touching" a file. The command "touch" will set the "last modified" time to the current time. If you touch a file when you do a purge, the file's timestamp becomes a record of when the last purge happened. Checking a file timestamp is very quick, especially if it is done repeatedly because Linux will cache the information. In PHP use exec or shell_exec (or something) to issue the touch? The file itself can be just a name, an empty file. The only purpose of the file is to have a timestamp. Maybe this will trigger some further ideas for you. Happy New Year!

[codeling]

Good thinking, but...

In PHP use exec or shell_exec (or something) to issue the touch?

Those commands are prohibited in quite a few environments I believe because of security reasons :(.
Thanks anyway for the idea, I'll think about it some more.
Happy new year to you too!