[Distutils] Deprecation of the endpoint "/pypi?%3Aaction=index"

[Nick Coghlan]

On 14 July 2016 at 05:05, Михаил Голубев <qsolo825 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys. I'd like to clarify Dmitry's question a bit.
>
> We have some issues with suggested "/simple" endpoint. Despite the need to
> scrap the web page, old endpoint allowed us to quickly find latest versions
> of the packages hosted on PyPI. We did a single request on IDE startup and
> showed outdated installed packages in the settings later. Index "/simple"
> however contains only package names and links to the dedicated pages with
> their artifacts (not for each of them, though). It means that now we have to
> make tons of individual requests to find the latest published version for
> each installed package. Isn't it going to load the service even worse?

Donald addressed this in the other thread, but summarising it quickly
here (mainly for the benefit of the list archives):

- the "/simple" API is really cache friendly, and hence almost always
gets served out of the Fastly cache instead of hitting the main app
server
- the main index endpoint isn't cache friendly at all, so many (most?)
requests to it will hit the main app server
- that main app server is the weak link in the current setup that's
responsible for the 503 errors folks still sometimes see
- rendering the index page can be one of the culprits contributing to 503's

So if folks are using pypi.python.org to get this info, we'd prefer
multiple requests to the /simple API over a single request to the
index page.

However, Donald's also going to look at providing a suitable batch
query endpoint on https://pypi.io/ that folks can start using, even
before Warehouse officially launches (similar to the way we're already
recommending Warehouse as the preferred upload server).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia