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Is it just me or Does Combined SE flair takes more time to update than Individual Sites Flair?

I have noticed that all my Individual sites flair are up-to-date almost all the time; but whenever I see my Combined Flair, it's not updated!

2 Answers 2

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Yes, combined flair is slower to update than per site flair. This is explicitly stated on your flair page:

https://stackexchange.com/users/YOUR_ID/YOUR-NAME?tab=flair

at the bottom it says,

(please note that only sites where you have more than 200 reputation will appear, and that flair is only updated once every 24-36 hours.)

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  • That message is also stated for per-site flairs.
    – user182466
    May 8, 2012 at 10:28
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No, that's probably by design.

Per-site flair is provided by the site itself. For example, my Physics.SE flair has a URL http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7433.png. Note that the host is physics.stackexchange.com, not stackexchange.com.

On the other hand, my combined flair is https://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1212053.png. The host is stackexchange.com

All SE sites cache inter-site data. For example, your rep and badges here and on the accounts section here will be slightly outdated, that's by design. Since stackexchange.com provides the combined flair, it will naturally use the cached value. I think the caching is to reduce a bunch of database queries(to different databases) that would otherwise have to be done every time someone views your profile/combined flair/whatnot.

On the other hand, the per-site flair need not use cached data, and even if it does, it can afford to update the cache much more frequently than the cross-site update.

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