The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Why does Google cache sometimes hang?

Why does Google cache sometimes hang?

Ever notice that some cached pages on Google will load only the top header part, and will then hang? This is very annoying. Here's an example:

http://tinyurl.com/2ku7t

What causes this?

J. D. Trollinger
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Seems fine to me...

SC
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Hmmm, I'm still getting only the header, but nothing in the body of the page. I've noticed this pretty often. I doubt it's my system, because I just tested other cached pages, and they work fine.

J. D. Trollinger
Thursday, January 22, 2004

I think it's that the page served up still has links and images from the old website. The inability to load one of those images (for example, the server is down) prevents the page from being able to render for an extended amount of time. Sometimes if you hit the stop button in the middle of the process you can have IE take its best guess at rendering the page.

Alyosha`
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Might also be that Google has a lot of machines dedicated to returning the results of a search quickly, but relatively few machines handling cache requests..

Cache requests can't be very many compared to the search requests, so why bother over-optimizing it ?

deja vu
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Often you can get different results from Google depending on your geography. Their distributed server farms aren't synchronized perfectly, so there's the potential for somewhat unique behaviour.

Don't know if it's related, but it's a possibility.

Nigel
Thursday, January 22, 2004

I agree with Alyosha`, it's trying to load images, CSS files and possibly ads from the original page.

www.MarkTAW.com
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Well, if it's trying to load a bunch of stuff from the original page, then what's the point of having a cache? Seems silly to me.

J. D. Trollinger
Thursday, January 22, 2004

If you think Google's cache is pointless, then don't use it.

If you expect Google to cache the whole world someday -- not just the text parts -- I expect you will continue to be disappointed.

Alyosha`
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Alyosha, your comments leave me puzzled.

My point was that the purpose of a cache is defeated if the cache attempts to read data from the original web page. I wasn't trying to say that Google cache is useless and that nobody should use it.

J. D. Trollinger
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Well, YOUR comments leave me puzzled! So there!

I donno what a better implementation would be ... consider that half the time, the graphics are still there, it's just that the content had changed. But the other half of the time, the whole site is down. Should be an option to replace all IMG tags with blank GIFs? To me, that's what hitting the stop button a bit early does.

One thing I wish is that links in cached pages were replaced by links to the pages in Google's cache. Oh well, can't everything ...

Alyosha`
Friday, January 23, 2004

I think google is skating on thin legal ice WRT copyright. Or maybe it's just a lightweight thing that doesn't need to be honed.

Tayssir John Gabbour
Friday, January 23, 2004

When I interview prospective team members, I don't care what degree they have. Only experience and demonstrable ability counts at the interview. One of the best engineers I ever hired had started out as a carpenter. If you need a degree to get your CV past HR, buy one.

Breandán Dalton
Friday, January 23, 2004