[WikiEN-l] Recent changes RSS feed

[RLS]

On 10/20/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> RLS wrote:
> > Can anyone shed some light on why the en.wp recent changes RSS feed is
> > only updating once every 20 minutes or longer?  It used to be as often
> > as every 2 or 3 minutes.
> >
> > I use Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool to keep an eye on the recent change
> > when I feel like vandal patrolling. It relies on the RSS recent
> > changes feed (since it includes diffs as part of the feed), but it's
> > practically useless if it only gets two or three updates an hour.
>
>
> Hmmm... I have some code in Wikiticker that would make it relatively
> easy for me to build a basic RSS feed for you:
>
> http://dev.scissor.com/wikiticker/
>
> But getting the diffs for every change would be enough hits on the
> server that I always assumed it was, well, gauche. So I never tried.
>
>
> Looking at the feed, though, for me it was updating every 5-20
> seconds.[1] So perhaps it was a transient problem?

Heh, I found the problem.  It's caused by the server-side caching of
the RSS feed for Special:Recentchanges.  If you have Lupin's
Anti-Vandal Tool running in one window, and it gets "stuck", visiting
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss
and adding &action=purge will immediately cause the tool to update
correctly on its next "pull".

Any possibility of disabling caching on the RSS feed? Is it even
possible to disable server-side caching for one particular page or
page format?

I'd rather not lose the benefit of server-side caching in general by
disabling it in my preferences (not to mention that everyone who uses
Lupin's AVT would have to do the same to guarantee that AVT would work
correctly for them), and I can't edit the script to add the
&action=purge as it's in someone else's userspace.

--en:Darkwind
(cc: wikitech-l)