Cache problems in Firefox

  • I have my installation working perfectly on my laptop and demo’d it to users. Then I uploaded it to a server where I am plagued by cache problems in Firefox.

    Typical symptoms are: I log off as Administrator and then log on as MikeD, but the Dashboard still shows the Admin options and “Logout (Administrator)”. Changing a user name or adding a new user does not show in the Authors and Users list. Promoting a user has no visible effect.

    The correct data is can only be seen after an appropriate Refresh (e.g. Ctrl-F5 or Shift-Reload). This needs to be done after each +1 in the case of promoting a user.

    Using FF to browse my laptop’s localhost site works fine (why?). Using IE works fine on both my local site, and the server.

    I have tried Clearing the browser cache and even cookies, quitting and restarting FF, but to no avail. Telling users to hit Ctrl-F5 after each page is displayed, is going to be really embarassing.

    Using WP1.5.1, with wysiwyg1.1 plugin only. FF1.0.4.
    Laptop: WinXP Pro, Apache2.0.52, PHP5.0.2, MySQL 4.0.21
    Server: Linux 2.4.18, Apache 2.0.40, PHP4.2.2, MySQL 3.23.58

    I have a PHP/MySQL database of my own running on the server, but it doesn’t exhibit this kind of caching behaviour.

    Can the cache behaviour be prevented? I found a few posts on cache issues, but couldn’t find whether there is a solution to this. Sorry if I missed it.

    Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Thread Starter MikeD

    (@miked)

    Have also just tried setting the following in Firefox about:config :-

    browser.cache.check_doc_frequency = 1
    Then quitting and re-starting Firefox.

    Still no improvement….<sigh>

    Mike, have a wee look at this: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/37141

    Might this be a solution to your problem? I had this problem this morning and thought it was Firefox caching things when it actually wasn’t.

    I followed the instructions in that article and everything is absolutely fine now – and I only ever use Firefox. (I tested it simultaneously on two machines too, just to double-check things are fine.)

    Hope this sheds some light on your problem. It’s the only thing I can come up with anyway!

    Regards,
    Croila

    Have you tried “eliminating” Firefox’s cache totally? I did that when I was having similar but slightly different issues. Made loading the pages painful but it worked.

    Still, the issue is a Firefox issue and not WordPress specifically, since WordPress doesn’t control the browser cache. Maybe talk to them?

    Thread Starter MikeD

    (@miked)

    Thanks for the suggestion Croila, but I don’t think that’s it. (I don’t have a ‘.’ user).

    Actually the easiest way to demonstrate the problem, is to choose any user in Authors & Users and try to promote them by clicking on the “?action=promote” link. The display refreshes but doesn’t change. After a few repeat attempts, press Ctrl-F5 and the display refreshes and shows the user level incremented by just +1.

    Using the local server or using IE, the user level increments by +1 on each click on the “?action=promote” link.

    Thread Starter MikeD

    (@miked)

    Lorelle, if I disable *both* the memory cache and the disk cache, then the problem indeed goes away. As you say though, this makes the browser very slow, and I can’t see my colleagues going for that as a fix.

    It does appear to be a browser issue (although WordPress does issue cache-control headers, and for all I know it isn’t sending one when it should ?? ), so I will try the Mozilla forums. I tried here first because it only affects WordPress and I thought someone might already know of a magic fix.

    I even put a small test PHP script in the wordpress/wp-admin directory that simply increments a counter via a POST form. It works fine, even though it doesn’t produce any cache-control headers. I can see that by the end of this, I’m going to know a whole lot more about caching than I ever wanted to….

    Thread Starter MikeD

    (@miked)

    I checked the headers produced by the server, using the Firefox Web Developer extension. Look OK to me.

    Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:39:45 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.2
    Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
    Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:39:45 GMT
    Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
    Pragma: no-cache
    Connection: close
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    ez4u2sai

    (@ez4u2sai)

    I found the same problem. I’ve since changed the Cache-Control lines with the code (there are 4 instances in total), to include ‘no-store’ as well (so the lines look like

    Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0

    then cleared the cache and things have worked perfectly since then.

    I’ve got the same problem, and I’ve always had it. Everything I try to tweak on Firefox either cripples the browser or does not help at all. This “feature” has resulted in me losing edits, images, and other updates. It is the most goddam annoying thing I have ever encountered w/r/t WordPress. (And don’t tell me it’s not a WP problem: I don’t have this issue with *any* other sites, pages, etc.)

    If someone has a *usable* fix, please post it. Reward money may be involved. I am damn tired of this, and hate the idea of having to use Internet Exploder to update my weblog.

    fb6668

    (@fb6668)

    Try using lower-case in all headers. This worked for me…

    expires:Mon, 01 Sep 1997 01:03:33 GMT
    cache-control:no-cache, no-store,must-revalidate, max-age=-1
    pragma:no-store,no-cache
    last-modified:Mon, 01 Sep 1997 01:03:33 GMT

    Using capitalisation works with IE, but having all header names lower-case makes them work in FF1.5 too

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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