Appropedia is carefully configured to perform as best as possible given our resources.
Cache[edit | edit source]
Appropedia uses Cloudflare to cache most web requests:
- Images, CSS and JavaScript are always cached
- HTML is cached only for anonymous users
- JSON is never cached, to allow for API requests to always get the latest data
Requests served by Cloudflare never reach the Appropedia server. They are served from the Cloudflare server closest to the user.
Appropedia uses Varnish to cache HTML for logged-in users.
Appropedia uses Memcached as the main object cache. On Jan 14 2024, OPcache was briefly enabled as an experiment and it caused a performance loss.
Mobile[edit | edit source]
Appropedia does NOT use Extension:MobileFrontend. The reason is that when a mobile device requests a page, MobileFrontend modifies the HTML in many ways, for example by moving the first paragraph to the top, collapsing sections, changing the JavaScript served, etc. This doesn't play well with our use of Cloudflare, because if a user visits a page from a mobile device, and Cloudflare caches that HTML, then the next time a user requests that page, they will be served the mobile HTML even if the request came from a desktop device. To get around this, Wikipedia has a different URL for mobile requests (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org), but this leads to complications and confusion. Better to keep it simple.