I would recommend keeping your home page fairly static so that you can also keep it as fast as possible.
Having your home page change too often will slow it down because it will always need to retrieve the latest information from the database. If you want to keep your forums as the prominent content of your site you could make the cache interval for that page smaller, or you could make it exclude the home page from caching. If you have a PageBlaster module on the home page you can control the cache interval or exclude it from caching when you edit the configuration of the module. The bottom line is that caching can make your page must faster by delivering a "snapshot" of the page from a certain point in time. To take more snapshots you lower the cache interval time. If you lower the cache time then you may not get as much performance benefit from the cached page depending on how many requests you have for the page. But if you have a lot of traffic you can have a very low cache interval and still gain a lot. |