On Wednesday 08 June 2005 08:32 pm, Mitchell Mebane wrote:
I'm putting together a Summer of Code proposal for working on the AppDB.
I've been talking with Chris Morgan, and he has a few suggestions, but I
was looking for more. Does anybody have any features they'd like added
to the AppDB, quirks they'd like worked out, or things of that nature?
I have some ideas about the AppDB, but I've been working on some of them
myself, and others really need the approval of the WinHQ webmaster more than
anything. Still, I'd like to hear what other people think of them:
1. The AppDB, Bugzilla and the Wiki ought to send last-modified information
for most of their pages. This would speed things up, in some cases, for
dialup users, but the real advantage would be as protection against a
slashdotting or onslaught of AOL users. Many of the pages also send other
headers that prevent caching of positive lookups.
Today I sent a patch to the AppDB maintainer to do this for images, which are
probably the biggest performance hit (they cause the AppDB main page to take
about 30 seconds to load over a dialup connection). However, almost any
page in each of these databases could in theory be cached. Bugzilla bug
display pages already display a "Last modified" datum in the text of the
page, and so do Wiki pages (bug 2889 mentions this).
Several of the AppDB tables already have TIMESTAMP columns, so I was planning
to write some code to just gather them all together and send the latest one
as the last-modified date. The only problem is that if a page contains an
item which is then deleted, its timestamp will go backwards.