Re: [Pan-users] cache article inconsistent

[Duncan]

Thufir Hawat posted on Tue, 26 Mar 2013 07:30:30 +0000 as excerpted:

> That one article was definitely readable.  While I don't have the log, I
> could just by watching the tasks it seems to download everything, but
> not everything actually gets cached.

I wonder... pan stores messages in cache using the message-id, with the 
non-filesystem-legal characters converted to something else (IIRC _).  Of 
course on Linux pretty much everything but / is filesystem legal, 
including unprintable characters that aren't message-id legal.  On MS, 
the native filesystems are rather more picky...

Anyway, if there's a bug in the message-id conversion process, it could 
be that the filename either ends up being filesystem-illegal, or that it 
gets stored with one name but pan looks for a different one.

Meanwhile, if the message was readable, clicking to read it should 
definitely have cached it as well.  So it should have been cached at that 
point, or possibly logged an error as to why it wasn't.  But then pan 
should have displayed it (unreadable, at least with pan), either.

The other possibility is that the server's doing something strange, maybe 
you have a bad front-end or something, and it's intermittently returning 
errors for posts that on the next request (or a request via another 
connection that is routed to a different server) it returns just fine.  
I've seen that happen before.  In particular, certain Highwinds brand 
server products in certain configurations are infamous among heavy news 
users for this sort of thing.  What's bad is that if they're configured 
in a load-sharing arrangement, then the bad front-end will always look 
like it has less load than the others as people who get it either get 
disgusted and quit, or keep trying until they get a connection to a good 
front-end, so new connections will tend to be to the bad one.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman