The plugin catalog stops re-reading its repository on every request

Opening the plugin catalog — or any page that counts what is available — asks a registry for its list. Answering that question used to mean fetching the entire source repository from GitHub and re-reading every module description in it, from scratch, for each request.

Measured from inside two production installations: answering with an 8.7 KB list connected in three hundredths of a second and then took twelve to nineteen seconds to send the first byte. Measured from an installation asking: about sixty requests a day ran past the half-minute a single attempt is allowed, over more than a month.

That never showed as an outage — a later attempt usually succeeded — which is why it went unnoticed for so long. What it did show as was a catalog that could sit spinning for half a minute, and sixty red lines a day that a reader had to recognise and dismiss.

What changes

The repository is read once per change, not once per request. The list a registry builds from a repository is now kept and reused. Requests that arrive at the same moment share a single read instead of each starting their own.

A merge is still visible immediately. A registry already hears from its repository whenever a build goes green; hearing that is what makes it read again. The reuse has a five-minute ceiling as well, so a missed notification costs at most a few minutes of staleness rather than an indefinite wait — that ceiling is the backstop, not the mechanism.

Everyone still sees exactly what they are licensed for. What is reused is what the REPOSITORY said, before any decision about who is asking. Who may see which module — and which of those a plan covers — is still decided for every request, individually. Reusing the finished answer instead would have been a way for one installation to be shown another's catalog, and that is deliberately not what happens here.

Downloads are unaffected. Installing a module still reads its files fresh every time. Only the LIST is reused.

What this does not change

A failure is never kept. If a read fails, nothing is remembered from it and the next request tries again — a momentary failure cannot become a permanently broken catalog.

It can be switched off. Setting PluginCatalog:ListingCacheSeconds to 0 restores the previous behaviour exactly. A malformed value falls back to the default rather than to "off", so a typo cannot silently bring the old cost back.

Nothing about what a registry serves changes. The same catalog, the same entitlements, the same wire format — read from a repository that is no longer asked the same question once per visitor.