Last modified: 2013-06-18 15:56:40 UTC
The list of pages generated by Special:Shortpages is now displaying articles that have been deleted or are redirects. The change in behaviour began sometime after 22:30, November 12, 2005 (UTC).
Shortpages has been switched to cached mode because the indexes turn out to be badly inefficient for it on the large wikipedias. Adding an appropriate index for it should be possible, so it can be switched back. IIRC it requires something like (page_namespace,page_is_redirect,page_len).
*** Bug 4058 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I tested various indexes on frwiki. Without a use or force, the optimiser didn't pick (page_namespace, page_is_redirect, page_len) but did pick (page_namespace, page_is_redirect, page_len, page_title). So I suggest the latter. That made it a covering index also, so it should be a very fast query. I'll leave the test indexes on frwiki for a few hours so you can test yourself. Please drop the indexes when done, or use a private IRC chat to let me know you're done with them and I'll do it. I'm not worried about the index being quite big. I don't expect more than one or two index pages to be loaded and do expect that it's better to pull in those covering index pages than the larger number of row pages I expect to be needed to get the titles for the small pages - expect those to be unpopular, nearly random and need more like 50 page loads.
Most Specialpages like these are cached, but are shown more user-friendly than they were at the time. WONTFIX'ing.
Reopening. There's still clear benefit to having as many special pages as possible real-time, if we're willing to use the indexes. We might judge that it's not worth it to slow table modifications for the sake of two special pages, but if so, that's not your decision to make.
I'm seeing INDEX (page_len), so maybe this is doable?
Done in r40909
Reverted in r41064
fixed as part of bug 26393
