Last modified: 2013-01-29 22:49:29 UTC
On mach 20th, 2008, at about 0:23 or 9:24 o'clock, I retrieved Special:Uncategorizedpages from the ksh Wikipedia. (1) The page indicated a cache-date of March 16th, 2008 (I forgot the time) (2) I got an empty list, altough there was at least one uncategorized article, at that time, see: http://ksh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timmer&action=history (which I knew) (3) The summary text in the page was the German fallback, although about 32 hours earlier, a translation had been entered in the Mediawiki name space, and then the previously deleted older default restored for documentational purposes, see: http://ksh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Uncategorizedpages-summary&action=history While I understand chaching, and I accept that the page cache possibly held the old int:Uncategorizedpages-summary as well, it is unclear to me, why I saw an empty list. Imho, I should have seen either previously cached data including everything, or a previously cached list with a newer set of message texts. I began to write this bug report, and while attempting to check twice, found that the cache had just been rebuilt. Now I got: (1) cache date/time: 09:25, 20. Mäz 2008, (2) a list of 139, including the abovementioned page, (3) the most recent message texts. Thus I now believe, my request hit the cache during a non-atomic update operation. Admittedly, what I observed is likely a problem of low importance and low impact. It nevertheless deserves a fix. Maybe, a more general problem affecting other cached data as well is causing this one.
Sorry that nobody took a look at this report in a timely manner when it was reported, gave feedback and investigated. This is not reproducible, and unfortunately nowadays hard to investigate as the data center setup plus used technologies have changed a lot in the meantime. This unfortunately doesn't mean that there are no caching issues nowadays, just that there are different reasons and underlying problems.
