This isn't actually related to the proposed duplicate, it's a separate (recent) caching mechanism. Starting a few weeks ago, we cache the view count for 5 minutes at a time (this may vary later, but it's the same on SO as other sites, for now).
View Count is an incredibly expensive thing for SO in particular given it's traffic numbers, we have to keep several things in mind, it has to be:
- synced across all web servers hosting SO (6 right now)
- written to the database
- indexed, meaning that update isn't free or very cheap overall
- written often, but not insanely often, like every view
To do this in a reasonable way, a few things happen here that cache at different levels:
- To keep things sane, we rack up some view counts before updating them in a batch
- The batch is per web server in local cache, then when it fills, views are incremented in the database
- After 5 minutes, the cache shared between servers expires and refreshes from the database
Now immediately you think "well that's way more than 5 minutes"...that's not the case for SO. That per-server buffer isn't that large (300 at the moment for SO, 30 for other sites), it flushes in under a minute...much faster at peak traffic times.
All this means the effective delay in view count is about 5 minutes - that's why you'll see some strange numbers on a brand new question.
In the example above, given the time in the screenshot, a refresh over the next minute should update the view count (now at 50), since the question was asked at off-peak hours and that's the maximum time for that per-server buffer to do it's work.