Last modified: 2004-10-31 20:42:36 UTC
All images are currently loaded from upload.wikipedia.org, for extra security - which is a good thing. However, what's not good is the way they are loaded - via a HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily redirect. Not only does this mean every image needs two HTTP requests to load, it also causes IE to always re-check the redirect whenever it displays an image. Although the actual image data is cached, it *always* loads the original image URL to see if the redirect still goes to the same place. Thus if a user goes to Wikipedia's Main Page, goes to another article and clicks back, every image will be re-checked, delaying loading by quite a while and creating many needless HTTP requests. I've tried sending various HTTP headers to make IE cache the redirect location, but I can't. I think the only solution is to directly point the image SRC to upload.wikipedia.org.
From bug 638: "As far as I can see setting the full URL path in $wgUploadPath should be sufficient." Can someone please change this? It will reduce load for images, and fix the cache problems with IE.
