2010/7/30 Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com>
I can a bit elaborate on what Daniel said.
Whenever anyone edits a page, there're (simplistic view) of three caches
that get populated.
1. Revision text cache (for operations like diffs, re-parsing for other
settings, etc)
2. Parser cache (for logged in users)
3. Edge HTTP cache - squid (for anonymous users)
So, anonymous users get "completely devoid of user preferences" pages, as
they are simply defaults.
Do note, even though squid cache objects can vary based on accept-encoding
(we narrowed it down to two versions from 10 few years ago ;-), they map to
single parser cache object.
[...]
As I told, I'm far from deep into those stuffs (I wonder why I'm listed
here, ;-) if I can understand perhaps 5% of talk contents).
So I got a simple try: I unlogged myself from beloved it.source so pulling
away all my css and js tricks, and I "reload" the page, then I reload
again.
My browser, while reloading, is forced to get data from a dozen of
differents URLS: it runs from it.source to en.source to
bits.wikimedia.org then again and then again here and there.... needed
time to reload a simple, very simple web page: 12 s.
I guess, that if a plain html + css cached version (without any default js
and perhaps with a single, included css section) of the page could be found,
such a time would be much shorter.
Alex