On Jan 13, 2008 8:45 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Simetrical wrote:
On 1/13/08, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
As a side effect we turned off 'refresh' button on your browsers.
This means what, exactly? That, e.g., Ctrl-F5 on Firefox will no longer bypass the caching layer?
Apparently so -- I just had a friend ask me if I knew why he was suddenly having trouble refreshing one of the Reference Desk pages.
I suspect this will cause a lot of confusion for talk and talk-like pages.
He shouldn't have to refresh. The page should have been purged from the wikimedia caches by mediawiki when it was changed.
Whatever caused the edit triggered purge to get missed needs to be fixed. I have no doubt that there are a few code pathways where some needed purges may be missed, but it seems that users have adapted by adding a fair amount of paranoid pointless refreshing and purging. Better to make the problems more expose so they can be found and fixed.
Otherwise most users (whom haven't developed the habit of aggressively refreshing/purging) will continue to get stale data in that situation, and client induced cache flushing will remain a cause of poor performance and a possible source of DOS vulnerabilities.