I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed by diligent wikipedians browing the list of ‘recent changes’, checking an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus generating a new request to the database, over and over again. An expensive request as well, in terms of database processing (I presume) and html page size, up to 500 records might be sent.

My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server considerably: add target=”_blank” to each link on the ‘recent changes’ page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The ‘recent changes’ list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response times somewhat.

Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond redisplay of the changes list).

Erik Zachte