Hi, i've set a proxy cache for my app ( app is allso served by nginx ). My problem is that i would like to have my app control the cache a little bit so i have hooks that delete files whith keys matching certain paths when some events in the app take place. This also works ok but the problem is that during stress testing if i remove a file from the nginx cache i get a lot of php-fpm processes stampeeding to generate that file in the cache.

I would like to mention that i am using proxy_cache_use_stale updating in order to prevent stampeeding when nginx needs to rebuild cached pages that have expired naturally but that won't help when i remove them from the cache myself.

Question is ... how can i make certain pages expire when the application decides they need to be refreshed ? or ... how can i safely delete them and not have a php riot ?