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This appears to be the same or similar issue as this, though it is not fixed.

I had noticed it intermittently over the last week.

On a refresh of the Newest Questions page, questions that were there are gone, only older ones appear. Several refreshes later all is well in the world.

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This just happened again - some questions were marked "3 minutes ago", a refresh and they are gone and I am only seeing "6 minutes ago", even though there are newer questions.

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And at exactly the time it happened, we were building/deploying Stackoverflow. Whether it was the deploy, or simply the fact of picking up a different server (as they cycled), simply: for a brief moment, the cache was slightly older than you had before. This particular cache is self-managing, and when it notices that it is stale, it automatically kicks off a task to freshen itself in the background - but continues serving the marginally older data while it does so (so as not to delay requests).

Basically, I'm not sure we need to change anything here. It is a rare event, only exists for a few seconds (typically while we deploy), and is self-fixing within a few seconds.

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  • Fair enough. It simply felt like a bug. I have seen this last for a minute or so.
    – Oded
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 10:50
  • @Oded what is the exact URL of the page you see this on? we also have top-level caching of the page contents, which might extend the duration a little. If you confirm the URL you are using, I'll see if we can make the refresh kill the page level cache
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 10:54
  • stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=newest
    – Oded
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 10:54
  • @Oded hmmm.... no explicit additional cache in there; I assume it was simply taking a few seconds to refresh itself (immediately after an app-pool reload, etc)
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 11:08
  • Possibly. Does this really explain seeing newer posts disappearing from the page? As you said, it does end up self-fixing, but sometimes the cache would be several minutes out of date (I have seen 9 minutes).
    – Oded
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 11:16
  • @Oded yes, if we are cycling the servers. That particular cache is somewhat complex; we snapshot the data literally at random, between 5 and 10 minutes. When reloading from an empty app-domain, it loads the snapshot data, which could be as much as that out of date, yes. It will catch up soon, though.
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 11:25
  • Fair enough... Had my share of multiple cache levels issues. Looks like this is here to stays... Happy to see this [status-declined].
    – Oded
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 11:26
  • This just happened (assuming you are moving from rev 2012.6.11.2858 to rev 2012.6.11.2864) - though now the newest entries are a week old! I am seeing stuff from June 4th as new :( And I am not seeing a return to normalcy either.
    – Oded
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 12:13
  • @Oded on where? I just switched something over - it should fix itself momentarily. But: where are you seeing it?
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 12:14
  • SO: stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=newest
    – Oded
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 12:15
  • @Oded k - switching it back... I need to give that switchover code some love :(
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 12:18
  • Ta. That looks better now...
    – Oded
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 12:20

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