479495 - periodically reload personas data

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Labs Graveyard :: Personas Plus, defect, P1)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

The extension used to reload personas data every half hour, but the current version of the extension doesn't do that anymore, it just loads the data once on startup.  It should load data periodically thereafter so personas data doesn't go stale for users who leave their browsers running for days.

telliott, cbeard: to ensure scalability, how often should the extension reload the data?  Is the former interval of half an hour ok, or should it be less frequent?

The related question is how often personas data changes, since if it doesn't change very frequently, then there's no reason to reload it so frequently even if we're capable of scaling to that frequency.

Comment 1

[Toby Elliott [:telliott]]

Of the 300 or so personas on the site, ~20 of them have undergone changes at some point. I don't think any has been changed more than twice (usually a title misspell). 

Once a day would probably be plenty. We might dovetail that with some of the popularity metrics being discussed.

Comment 2

[Chris Beard]

i agree that once a day is probably good enough for now.  however, it would be good if the server could also throttle this in some way.

for example: would it be possible to somehow use the disk cache for this like we should be doing for images?  that is, we can set HTTP 1.1 headers on the server to define "last modified:" and "expires:" and then the client would only load from the server if the item is not in the cache, or if it had expired.

(BTW, this doesn't seem to be working for the image files as when i connect after being offline the persona fails to load and i get a white background.  about:cache shows an expiration date of "1969-12-31 16:00:00")

worse case, the client should back off in multiples of 2 if it fails to load this data file from the server (e.g. if the interval is 30 minutes and a load fails, it shouldn't try again for 60 minutes, and then if that fails, it shouldn't try again for 120 minutes...)

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: patch v1: matches exact domains

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 363988 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1: matches exact domains

Erm, this was attached to the wrong bug.

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: patch v1: refreshes data daily

Comment 6

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Fixed by changeset e627c05d3011.  The client refreshes the data daily (as well as on every startup, which is suboptimal and should be fixed in the future).  The loads are regular loads, so we can always tune the server to make the client cache these data files for longer if necessary.