On 3/28/14, Shawn Jones sjone@cs.odu.edu wrote:
Hi,
As part of our extension testing, we've set up varnish in accordance with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Varnish_caching
One of the things we've noticed is that our oldid URIs are cached, whereas Wikipedia doesn't seem to cache those pages.
Is there a reason why Wikipedia doesn't do this? Is there some threshold that Wikipedia uses for caching?
Thanks in advance,
Shawn M. Jones Graduate Research Assistant Department of Computer Science Old Dominion University
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I think your caching is set up incorrectly. MediaWiki does not (afaik) send an smaxage caching header for requests with an oldid in them. See the $output->setSquidMaxage( $wgSquidMaxage ); line in MediaWiki::performAction (line 425 of includes/Wiki.php). The caching headers are only sent if the url is in the list of urls that can be purged (basically normal page views and history page views). If other pages are being cached, it probably means all pages are being cached for you, which is not a good thing and will cause problems, since there are some pages that really should not be cached.
In the case of oldid urls, it may make sense for us to send caching headers with oldid urls, since they do not change (excluding of course oldid's that don't exist)
--bawolff