255458 - live bookmark shouldnt use cache

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Mathieu Pellerin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040811 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040811 Firefox/0.9.1+

maybe I'm wrong but I have the strong feeling live bookmark uses cache when it
comes to refresh. Often I go to a website to find there are new articles and the
rss feed didn't refresh properly ...

I downloaded the Sage extension after to find out it was correctly updating the
rss feeds.

So my guess was that the live bmark uses the cache system and sage doesn't; it
might be another problem but the fact is : Sage properly detects updated rss
while the internal rss system doesn't.

Please have a look at that, I like the way its done with bookmark but its
useless if the updates are not working well.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Download Sage extension and install
2.Put some rss feeds in sage and the same also as live bookmark
3.Use both on a regular basis (always starting with the live bookmark when you
update your rss)
Actual Results:  
You will see sage shows the updated rss when the live bookmark didnt find any


Expected Results:  
Shouldnt see any difference

I guessed it was dealing with using the cache or not because once Sage gets the
updated rss feeds, the live bookmark will get them too. 

I will now try to desactivate the network.http-usecache pref and see if it makes
a difference (I'm sure it will)

Comment 1

[Mathieu Pellerin]

okey confirmed ... I changed the _obscure_ browser.cache.check_doc_frequency
value ( I though 3 meant a kind of ratio like 1/3 ...)

I changed the value to 1 (meaning checks if an object in the cache is new every
time it loads the objects) and the rss feeds got updated as often as sage ...
this made me happy but also made me think the rss feed system is useless to
anyway who wants to use it to get news _as fast as possible_ ...

with firefox out of the box, I will insert a rss feed ... check in 24 hours
later to see no change but if I go on the website, some news might be added on
the site that is not shown in the rss feed because the rss object was not
expired ...

soooo, either you change the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency to 2 (which makes
more sense to any common user: the value 2 means once per session, the cache
system will check for updates ... rather than once the object is expired, it'll
check (some people don't put any expiration dates, and it cannot be reliable on
rss feeds)

or the rss feeds doesn't use the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency and when the
user clicks "refresh live bookmarks", it actually seeks to refresh itself
bypassing the caching system which is irrelevant for rss feeds (and wouldn't
hurt anyone since the files are often small)

you should really think of a solution before 1.0 final otherwise its a useless
system if you don't hack thou about:config and know the
browser.cache.check_doc_frequency values (not explained in the help system btw,
but only when searching on mozilla.org)

you would avoid bad reviews on your rss feeds, and nobody would switch to opera
for their working-without-cache feed system :)

(btw, this browser.cache.check_doc_frequency value should deserve some options
in the advanced pane, I think I'll fill a bug for that)

Comment 2

[Mathieu Pellerin]

quick update: the browser.cache.check_bla_bla helped a little bit but firefox is
still missing some updated feeds (just loading the old file).

I think it has two main reasons: cache + sometimes I feel firefox forgets to
check for updates on certain feeds.

Comment 3

[Mathieu Pellerin]

okey ... it seems that some livemarks get updated and some simply load the
cached version _even though_ the cache settings are set to "check doc everytime"

when using sage, it'll properly load the new rss feed and then firefox will show
the new feeds if you reload the livemarks because the cache as been updated by sage.

I really thought I could get rid of sage... lets try to narrow down the problem
and get the rss feed system to work properly

Comment 4

[Mathieu Pellerin]

at first I thought it was a problem of cache, but I realise now it must be
something wrong with the update prossedure in the feed system of firefox. Some
random thoughts I would look at if I had a dev. machin

* the update system doesnt read the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency value (so
if you set it to 1 - always check for newer doc - it'll still do the default
behaviour (check when doc outdated)
* when the feed is download, the function that checks if there is something new
is broken and leaves the old file
* etc.

at first when I created this thread I really thought it was a simple question of
caching settings put it turns out its more than that

Comment 5

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Attachment: bm-lm-bypass-cache-0.patch

Just set cache bypass on the load.

Comment 6

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

landed on aviary, will make it to trunk when I merge

Comment 7

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change