In an effort to reduce our traffic by cutting out unintentional reloads
(particularly through using the 'back' and 'forward' buttons in Internet
Explorer), certain accesses to Wikipedia are now marked to allow
browsers to cache them.
Now cacheable are:
- Viewing an article's current version
- Viewing an older version of an article
- Showing an article's history
- Recent changes list
The browser still must check with the server to see if the page has
changed, but if it hasn't the browser's cached version can be shown,
saving a lot of database sorting, wikitext parsing, link checking, and
bandwidth. If it has changed, you get the new version.
I haven't been able to get Mozilla to consistently behave correctly
(probs with the expiry time; it doesn't check for updates), so for
Gecko-based browsers the pages will still be marked as un-cacheable.
This isn't as big a deal anyway, as Mozilla will in any case use cached
pages when traversing the "back" and "forward" buttons; IE's
forced
reloads in this situation are the primary target.
(The pages are also marked 'private', so shared proxy caches shouldn't
send one person's logged-in pages to another person.)
If anyone has (new) problems with pages showing old versions when they
shouldn't, please let me know!
So far this is installed only on
www.wikipedia.org and
test.wikipedia.org. It'll go on meta and the rest of the languages soon
when I get other things updated this weekend.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)