On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:29:31 -0800, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 January 2012 22:14, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Cache pollution.
It would have to be a severely broken cache to be polluted by a 503. 503 is for temporary unavailability, you would be stupid to cache it.
You do realize that going by what you are saying. If 503's weren't cached for that reason, then EVERY single request would be forwarded to the apaches. That means all the cache optimization would disappear and ALL of Wikipedia's IMMENSE anonymous user traffic that's been sustained by the caches would suddenly start all hitting the apaches. Naturally the cluster is not designed to handle that. In fact I bet it could take down the blackout page by essentially DoSing Wikipedia.