On 9/16/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm sure Tim or Brion know the answer to this, but I'd hazard a guess that the /w form bypasses the squid caches. In general, reader activities have the /wiki form of the URL, and in those cases it's okay if the reader sees a cached squid proxy copy of the page, whereas editing activities (edit, history, what links here, and special pages) tend to have the /w form of the URL. In those cases the request would normally be performed by a script in realtime, and the squid proxies aren't running PHP code and have no database access so they can't do that. The squids are basically dumb mirrors that sit in between the reader and the Wikipedia system and only fetch a page from the system if they have no up-to-date copy in their cache.