I've just started to use Azure Websites to host one of the websites I'm working on. Everything has been very smooth so far, but what I've realized is that when we update our website, sometimes that update becomes available immediately, but far to often it can take several hours before the changes go live.
I've tried to deploy both through the publishing-tool in Visual Studio 2012 and by pushing a Git repo to the website with git push azure master, and both experience the same delay. When I push an update, the right commit is immediately visible in the Azure Management Portal, but the changes does not have an effect on the website until hours after. There seem to be some kind of cache there, which is quite annoying.
I run a shared website instance (not the free one), if that makes any difference.
I've read this post on MSDN, which seems to be related, but the thread doesn't provide a solution, and I haven't been able to track down any other information.
Is this a known bug and is there some way to get around it?
Stop and Start the website in the Portal. Make sure the website goes offline before you Start the site. I was having a similar issue where it seemed to be caching the site and changes weren't being applied after the upload. This seems to fix it for me.