A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages. When the page is edited (only by a sysop), he/she would render the page to HTML, possibly by explicitly accessing /wiki/Main_Page, and save it as /index.html. Would this help some server strain?
Could we also cache other pages known to link only to existing pages, such as this week in dates ([[April 30]], etc.), [[Current events]], and [[Recent deaths]]? Or are these pages updated too often to be useful? Could we also cache the protected pages?
-[[User:Geoffrey]]
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(Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com): A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages. When the page is edited (only by a sysop), he/she would render the page to HTML, possibly by explicitly accessing /wiki/Main_Page, and save it as /index.html. Would this help some server strain?
Could we also cache other pages known to link only to existing pages, such as this week in dates ([[April 30]], etc.), [[Current events]], and [[Recent deaths]]? Or are these pages updated too often to be useful? Could we also cache the protected pages?
It might be possible to either (1) have Apache look for our cookies, and if it determines that this is a non-logged-in user, serve a static front page instead of going through the script; or (2) have the "/" url itself be a small and fast script that checks the cookies and redirects to either the large script or the static page.
Just for information...
One of our user, Oliezekat has decided that it would be nice for the french wikipedia to provide user-modifiable main page; with possibly blocs of information movable, and colors choosable at user wish.
For this, he mentionned some stuff I didnot understand very well, css external files for colors, some static links or something...
He put his proposition of page on the french main page. I must mention this page requires XHTML politically correct browser.
Attached what I see of this proposition of him of our main page.
To compare with http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accueil
If XHTML is accepted on the main page, there is no reason it won't be afterwards on other pages. Of course, that implies that wikipedia becomes non-editable non readable to non-XHTML friendly browsers.
I am a bit embarrassed, and would be happy to have any advice on this.
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On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:47:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com Subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching
A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages.
Actually, it seems to happen rather often that someone or something formerly rather obscure suddenly hits the headlines, or dies, and suddenly appears on the [[Main Page]]. Of course, usually at least a stub is made very soon after, but I don't think it qualifies as a "never". And it's good to be able to see whether or not the article does exist yet when you see the Main Page, of course. For instance, right now, the first two "Recent deaths" on the English Wikipedia, Bernard Katz & Nina Simone, both didn't have any page at all until they died.
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:02:31 -0500 (CDT), John R. Owens jowens.wiki@ghiapet.homeip.net gave utterance to the following:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:47:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com Subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching
A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages.
Actually, it seems to happen rather often that someone or something formerly rather obscure suddenly hits the headlines, or dies, and suddenly appears on the [[Main Page]]. Of course, usually at least a stub is made very soon after, but I don't think it qualifies as a "never". And it's good to be able to see whether or not the article does exist yet when you see the Main Page, of course. For instance, right now, the first two "Recent deaths" on the English Wikipedia, Bernard Katz & Nina Simone, both didn't have any page at all until they died.
I presume that it is one of the admin jobs to select and update the items that appear on the "In the news" "Recent deaths" etc. link lists. That is likely to happen twice a day at most, probably once. What would happen under a caching system is that the interface to gegenerate those components simply rewrites the cached version of the page. What we would lose with caching, however, is indicators such as the asterisk showing that someone has edited your talk page if you are logged in. Perhaps (if people don't scream blue murder about popups), logged in users could have a little popup console where these dynamic things happen. For Opera/Mozilla it could be written as a panel or sidebar.
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html?
I did this manually during the slashdotting a couple months back. It was probably a bigger help then, as a LARGE chunk of our hits came from one direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/ from the /. article.
Currently, the main page accounts for 1.2% of hits. Not zero by any means, but not _that_ huge. Compare with 2.71% in January, where the whole month's average was shot up by the /. story spike.
It's not really an issue of nonexistent links, though, but of general things that change: news items are added daily, the date counter changes on its own daily, the article count changes constantly. And of course the login issue.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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