Last modified: 2013-09-04 11:48:17 UTC
The documentation for maxlag states that any errors should be returned with a 503 HTTP response code: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Maxlag_parameter However, on the version of MW running on the English Wikipedia (1.17wmf1), the error comes back as 200 OK instead: $ curl -v 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&maxlag=-10' * About to connect() to en.wikipedia.org port 80 (#0) * Trying 208.80.152.2... connected * Connected to en.wikipedia.org (208.80.152.2) port 80 (#0) > GET /w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&maxlag=-10 HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.3 > Host: en.wikipedia.org > Accept: */* > * HTTP 1.0, assume close after body < HTTP/1.0 200 OK < Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:58:35 GMT < Server: Apache < Cache-Control: private < Retry-After: 5 < X-Database-Lag: 0 < MediaWiki-API-Error: maxlag Bug or feature? See also: https://github.com/jpatokal/mediawiki-gateway/issues/22#issuecomment-2191496
I think maxlag giving 503 is only supposed to happen on the normal web interface (aka http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?maxlag=-1 ) not the api (because errors are kind of handled in the api at the response level, not at the http protocol level) but I am unsure.
503s for maxlag in api.php were implemented at some point (in r52190) but reverted quickly (r53353) because of backwards compatibility concerns. See the discussion on those revisions for more background. The manual page documents the 200 behavior now, thanks to this bug :)
Is this fixed now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/api.php?action=view&maxlag=-1 gives a 503.
Nevermind...the api still gives 200. (Above is not api request...silly me)
