The ongoing LaTeX issues on Physics Forums have persisted for 10 months, primarily attributed to potential caching problems introduced by the service provider around April 13, 2010. Users have reported that refreshing and resending after each preview serves as a temporary workaround. The problems occur consistently across all browsers and operating systems, indicating a systemic issue rather than a localized one. The discussion highlights the need for server configuration adjustments to prevent caching of LaTeX images, with a potential solution being the adoption of MathJax 1.1 once it is released from beta.
PREREQUISITESThis discussion is beneficial for web developers, forum administrators, and anyone involved in managing LaTeX rendering on online platforms, particularly those facing similar caching issues.
Fredrik said:There's probably 20 threads about this already, but most of them just say that the workaround is to refresh and resend after each preview. It appears that we've had this problem since April 13, 2010. According to our LaTeX guy, chroot, nothing changed on the server around that time. The problem is essentially the same in all versions of all browsers, on all operating systems. This strongly suggests that the service provider started doing some weird caching around then. Has anyone been in contact with them? Maybe Greg just needs to ask them to configure an exception.
I don't know this web stuff well enough to know if something can be done on the server. Is it possible to configure the web server software to instruct proxies to not cache images?
It seems to me that something else must be wrong, in addition to the fact that somebody is caching something. How does a transparent proxy know what image to use from the cache? Isn't the image identified by a file name or something? When I previewed these four LaTeX images, I got the two images from my previous post instead of 1 and 2, but 3 and 4 were fine.
1
2
3
4
Can someone explain how that's possible?