When we first put Varnish in front of our WordPress installation, we noticed that post scheduling became pretty unreliable. About half the time we’d schedule a post, it would either appear much later than scheduled, or it would never appear on the site at all with the WordPress control panel showing the post’s status as “Missed Schedule.”
It turns out that WordPress has an, uh, interesting way of implementing post scheduling: because they don’t want to require that people have access to a proper cron daemon, WP has its own jury-rigged cron wannabe called WP-Cron, which relies on users regularly accessing WordPress PHP pages to kick off scheduled tasks at the appropriate time. The problem is that Varnish was working so damn well and caching so much content from cache, the Apache/WordPress backend wasn’t getting hit often enough for WP-Cron to work reliably. Based on the miscellaneous kvetching that can be found about WP-Cron, this is apparently only one circumstance in which it may not work reliably.
The way to fix this turned out to be forcing the WP-Cron script to run every minute using regular cron by configuring a job like this on the web server:
* * * * * lynx --dump http://mysite.com/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Note that you’ll want to have the job hit the WP-Cron page directly through Apache, bypassing Varnish or whatever page cache you’re using. (Or, you could just configure Varnish not to cache that page, but that would allow the public to hit your WP-Cron page and potentially cause a spike in your resource utilization, which may not be desirable.)
occasional coherence 