On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, tarquin wrote:
> do we generate the HTML from Wiki code every single time a page is viewed?
Presently yes, unless your browser caches it on your end.
To do caching on the server, we have to finish working out issues of
changes made to the html output by variations in user preferences (some
things, like the TeX html/image/mathml? options, will perforce alter the
output; others can be relegated more to the stylesheets than they are now)
and whether we can also cache the whole thing including the template.
The fastest thing would be to have a complete, ready-to-send page as a
file which we can spit right out upon determining that the requested page
is cached and the user isn't using funny options. Putting username/ip addr
in the corner, having a page counter, and having different sidebar links
available for anon and logged-in users complicates all this.
Another thing; on phase 2, we had problems with the caching code wherein
some things that were determined from parsing the page (interlanguage
links and link keywords for a meta tag) got dropped when viewing the page
cached. These either need to be pre-cached too, or need to be separately
fetchable. (For instance, magnus's experimental code with a separate
table. This needs to get finished and put in place!)
See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_strategy -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)