How to use cron with views cache?

Question

I have a dashboard with about seven views that are each very expensive. Most of the views can be computed hourly, but I would prefer cron to run them rather than the unfortunate user. How can I have cron refresh the views cache and never a user?

Answer 1

Something like this should work:

1. Set the Views to cache data.
2. Implement hook_cron(), and delete the cached data from the cache_views and cache_views_data tables.
3. Programmatically request the URL which contains the expensive Views to rebuild them (this could be done via CURL, file_get_contents(), etc.)

Answer 2

I implement things like that as a drush script, which I think invoke from a crontab. Something like would be a start:

$cids = array(...); // the $cid list that you want to nuke

foreach ($cids as $cid) {
  cache_clear_all($cid, 'cache_views'); // may want to also do {cache_views_data}
}

$urls = array(...); // the URLs w/ the views that you just cleared

foreach ($urls as $url) {
  $url = url($url, array('absolute' => TRUE)); // if needed
  cache_clear_all($url, 'cache_page');
  $request = drupal_http_request($url);
}

I then call it as

0 * * * * /path/to/drush -u 1 scr /path/to/script.php

from my crontab.

Doing it from crontab instead of Drupal cron can help eliminate PHP timeouts.