On 28.01.15 at 13:57, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
The special page was rewritten in MediaWiki 1.23 to make it usable on wikis the size of Wikipedia (commit 87be24db / https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110299/ and some follow-up changes). Unfortunately this optimization for massive wikis seems to have caused the performance to suffer on smaller ones a bit.
(I have no answer to your problems, just saying this. :( Perhaps it helps someone else help you.)
-- Bartosz Dziewoński
I've also noticed that with each time the Special:ActiveUsers page is reloaded, the time value in the message
You are viewing a cached version of this page, which can be up to ... old.
is decreased by 20 minutes on the "small" wikis, and by 10 minutes on "large" wikis such as Wikipedia. The message of the above linked commit is
Made ActiveUsers use querycache and do staggered updates on view
Is this what "staggered updates" are supposed to do? Does the cached page age really depend on how frequently it is loaded by users? This would explain why the age is over 29 days for small wikis, while large wikis serve ~1day old page.
CC'ing the author and committer of the change, so that we don't have to speculate anymore... The original post of this thread can be viewed here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2015-January/043850.html
-- Jakub Klinkovský