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When displaying Questions sorted by votes using the following URL (with 15 questions per page enabled!)

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=67&sort=votes&pagesize=15

afte the lowest voted questions the list continues with high-voted questions:

enter image description here

The questions don't seem to be entirely sorted by votes, the order looks somewhat broken.

This also happens on Drupal Answers on the following page (screenshot)

https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions?page=67&sort=votes&pagesize=15

and on Physics

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=67&sort=votes&pagesize=15

and on Gaming

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions?page=67&sort=votes&pagesize=15

It is not always reproducible, occasionally the right order appears. I saw this on every SE site I tried it on, including Stackoverflow itself.

I've looked a bit further and found that exactly the first 1000 questions are sorted correctly, afterwards it goes wrong. The pattern repeats every 1000 questions, so after 2000, 3000, ... questions there is another break in the sorting.

I've observed this now for a few weeks, so this is not a temporary caching problem.

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  • Interesting. It seems the breaking point is 1000 questions. You can see the same on the 50 and 30 questions per page views.
    – Jeff Mercado
    Jun 16, 2011 at 19:16
  • 1
    It is really random for me now, sometimes I see the issue and after reloading it's gone again, then it appears again ...
    – Mad Scientist
    Jun 16, 2011 at 19:18
  • @Fabian: I see that too. Though it seems like it would only show if it was fine, then you refresh. It doesn't seem to become fine if you refresh after it showing. Or maybe I'm not refreshing enough.
    – Jeff Mercado
    Jun 16, 2011 at 19:30
  • I don't think it's random. As far as I can tell: go to that page, refresh. If you will refresh or start going forward it will be broken. When next minute comes (ie. when one minute turn to another eg. 15:02->15:03; my clock is sync with time server) everything will went to normal. If you go to page 67 again and refresh it will break again. EDIT: SO server is not sync with time server so it's more like 15:02:07->15:02:08
    – prostynick
    Jun 17, 2011 at 13:04
  • +1 I'm seeing strange behavior on vote sorts too, but I couldn't nail it exactly. The 1000 mentioned here fits, I'm listing 50 answers on a page, and pages 21,41,61 ... show a "jump" compared to the previous page. It wasn't as clear as your case, since 1000 divides a lot more nicely by 50 than by 15 ;-)
    – takrl
    Jun 26, 2011 at 13:26
  • Confirmed - we're looking at it
    – Marc Gravell
    Jun 27, 2011 at 7:20

1 Answer 1

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The pattern repeats every 1000 questions, so after 2000, 3000, ...

yes, no prizes for guessing the block size that some of our caching (for this screen) works at ;p

Good spot, thanks. I think this should now be fixed everywhere.

Well, I thought I had fixed it... but it just killed all the questions... everywhere, which was not quite what I had intended... still looking.

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