Mailing List Archive

> (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.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

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.

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat
and I had my hands about it.
-- Rorschach, "Watchmen"

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)

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 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.


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