On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:35 AM, Asher Feldman <[email protected]>wrote:
> Regarding varnish cacheability of mobile API requests with a logging query > param - it would probably be worth making frontend varnishes strip out all > occurrences of that query param and its value from their backend requests > so they're all the same to the caching instances. A generic param name that > can take any value would allow for adding as many extra log values as > needed, limited only by the uri log field length. > > &l=mft2&l=mfstable etc. > > So still an edge cache change but the result is more flexible > while avoiding changing the fixed field length log format across unrelated > systems like text squids or image caches. > > On Sunday, February 3, 2013, Asher Feldman wrote: > > > If you want to differentiate categories of API requests in logs, add > > descriptive noop query params to the requests. I.e &mfmode=2. Doing this > in > > request headers and altering edge config is unnecessary and a bad design > > pattern. On the analytics side, if parsing query params seems challenging > > vs. having a fixed field to parse, deal. > > > Asher, I understand your hesitation about using HTTP header fields, but there are a couple problems I'm seeing with using query string parameters. Perhaps you or others have some ideas how to get around these: * We should keep user-facing URLs canonical as much as possible (primarily for link sharing) ** If we keep user-facing URLs canonical, we could potentially add query string params via javascript, but that would only work on devices that support javascript/have javascript enabled (this might not be a huge deal as we are planning changes such that users that do not support jQuery will get a simplified version of the stable site) * How could this work for the first pageview request (eg a user clicking a link from Google or even just browsing to http://en.wikipedia.org)? I may be missing other potential problems - it would be great if others from the mobile team could chime in. -- Arthur Richards Software Engineer, Mobile [[User:Awjrichards]] IRC: awjr +1-415-839-6885 x6687 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
