On 04/12/11 12:32, MZMcBride wrote:
This may be a stupid question as I don't
understand the mechanics
particularly well, but... as far as I understand it, there's a Squid cache
layer that contains the HTML output of parsed and rendered wikitext pages.
This stored HTML is what most anonymous viewers receive when they access the
site. Why can't that be dumped into a output file rather than running
expensive and timely HTML dump generation scripts?
In other words, it's not as though the HTML doesn't exist already. It's
served millions and millions of times each day. Why is it so painful to make
it available as a dump?
Most of the code would be the same, it's just a bit more flexible to
do the parsing in the extension, it makes it easier to change some
details of the generated HTML, and lets you avoid polluting the caches
with rarely-viewed pages. It's not especially painful either way.
-- Tim Starling