So you have a presentation control (let’s say a sublayout) that relies on Sitecore.Search APIs to get the data to render (news articles for example). Second ingredient in this recipe is HTML cache that you have enabled for this control. The third ingredient is a dedicated Content Delivery server.
You’ve got yourself a race condition between IndexingProvider and HTML Cache!
It’s time to revisit my old blog series from a couple of years ago. I’ve blogged about ways to setup a pre-production preview environment back in 2009 and 2010. I suggest reviewing those before reading this post further, as I am not going to provide a lot of context. Since the last post, I was getting even more questions about how to set this up, so here is another take on the same problem that involves less customization, and in my book, it’s much easier to setup.
The idea is simple and rotates around the notion of running kind of a “Live mode” on separate Pre-Production Preview server.
This server will source out content from the master database instead of “pre-prod web” database. This will let you get away from using publishing, thus reducing complexity.