Hi,
it seems that sysops often submit edits to the Main Page that don't actually change anything, and in their edit summary they give vague indications of caching problems.
Now apparently they came up with the idea of placing an HTML comment in the Main Page, <!-- cache purging value: red-->, and keep changing that word ("red" in this case) to something else.
This strikes me as a major pollution of the article history as well as wasted effort.
What is this all about? What is the caching problem? Can it not be solved by technical means?
Thanks, Timwi
On Mar 4, 2004, at 09:24, Timwi wrote:
What is this all about? What is the caching problem? Can it not be solved by technical means?
The problem is that pages are purged from the cache when *that page* is updated, but the Main Page on en.wikipedia.org has been restructured in a way that its content isn't *in* the page. The actual content is imported from other pages, and when those pages are edited, *those pages* are purged from the cache, but the Main Page isn't.
It's easy not to notice this if you're logged in or doing editing, since you'll have engaged a mode that only uses your browser's own cache and it's easy to reload, but visitors who have never logged in and not edited in this session will see the old cached version from the site-wide cache, which gets more and more out of date until somebody edits the page or does something else to purge it.
Tim's been working on a fix for this which will record the inclusion as a specially-marked link and then including pages can be purged when included pages are edited. I'm not sure if this is ready to go yet.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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