[pmwiki-users] Experimental caching feature on pmwiki.org

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On pmwiki.org I've put in place an experimental feature that
locally caches pages that take a "long time" (>3 secs) to render.

For example, the first time someone goes to 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Cookbook-ByCategory
it may take several seconds to display, but pmwiki.org caches the
HTML output of the main contents so that later visitors can
view the page without having to wait for the HTML to be regenerated.
The cached copy remains good until a page is updated on the site, 
at which point a cached page is regenerated the next time a 
visitor requests it.

The caching system tries to be smart enough to not use the cache 
if the page
 - includes (or attempts to include) read-only content
 - uses dynamic markup such as {$Author} or {$AuthId}
 - uses dynamic conditions such as (:if auth:), (:if authid:), (:if date:)
 - is in response to a GET or POST request with parameters
 - sets a property that may have a side effect, such as (:noleft:),
   (:noright:), (:noheader:), (:nofooter:), etc.

If you're curious about whether or not a page is being retrieved from
the cache, look for the "cached" marker at the bottom right of the
sidebar, or you can "View source" and look for the <!--cached-->
comment in the page text.

At the moment, pmwiki.org has this caching enabled only for the PmWiki,
Main, Cookbook, Site, and PITS groups.  If anyone notices anything
"odd" about the site, let me know and I'll look into it.

Again, this is currently an -experimental- feature; I expect
it will be available in the distribution code but not officially 
supported for some time (and perhaps not ever if it can't be 
made to work reliably).

Thanks,

Pm