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I have a dynamic sitemap that will change on a daily basis. Because I'm hosting on Heroku, I'm having some difficulty getting it to persist. I'm considering having the sitemap generate on request, rather than generated and saved to a static file on the server.

It's a large file with tens of thousands of entries so it takes a considerable amount of time to load. Will this affect how search engines treat my site?

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  • I am assuming sitemap.xml here. There is a limit of about 50k entries for a sitemap, however, I often suggesting less- about 45k. This should still result in a rather smallish file that downloads with ease. I would not have the file generated upon request- this would slow things down even more. And I am not so sure I would be working to cache this file. How many times will this file be requested per day? Not many. Certainly not by browsers which may be a hint here. Search engines know that sitemaps can be larger. It is not a page- but a resource so speed is not an issue. – closetnoc Mar 12 '15 at 15:39
  • Cached was not the right word. It's the choice between creating the sitemap from the database on every request or serving a static file generated as a timed server job (complex on Heroku because it has an ephemeral filesystem that you can't save to unless you push a repo) – Tom Chambers Mar 12 '15 at 20:11
  • Gotcha!! I generate mine when I generate content in a batch style process. I guess if not too many people are requesting a sitemap, then it is just a matter of how fast can you create one? Can you create a sitemap fast enough to not time out? For me, that would never really work- too many pages. Systems are fast enough these days that it might work. Worth a try perhaps. You can possibly use GWT Fetch as Google or the sitemap option to experiment. – closetnoc Mar 12 '15 at 21:13
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All browsers have a connection timeout where they give up when waiting on your server. For most browsers it is around 30 seconds. I was unable to find any documentation on what the connection timeout that Googlebot uses is, but I would expect it also to be around 30 seconds.

If you can keep your time to first byte under 30 seconds, I would expect that Googlebot would be able to fetch and use your dynamically generated sitemap.

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