I like this solution and am definitely tempted to give it a go.
Anyone got any thoughts on the best way to do this on a page with personalisation? (and this is really simple personalisation - one section of the page changes depending on whether you're logged in or not).
My solution would probably be to have the personalised section load as an async request but then you'd need to make sure that the async request can handle the same load as the microcached content.
You can put any nginx variable into the proxy_cache_key setting, including cookies and query strings. I've used this to cache localized versions of each page on a site based off of a "language" cookie. Async is a good approach for what you need, but it's good to know what nginx's caching mechanism can do.
That's how I've done it in the past. Depending on how many personalized requests you are doing, compared to the resource utilization savings you'll get from caching the rest of your content, you'll probably come out ahead.
Anyone got any thoughts on the best way to do this on a page with personalisation? (and this is really simple personalisation - one section of the page changes depending on whether you're logged in or not).
My solution would probably be to have the personalised section load as an async request but then you'd need to make sure that the async request can handle the same load as the microcached content.
Any other ideas?