I’m experiencing a strange issue with my Django REST Framework paginated list view, which utilizes a 2 hour cache. If I repeatedly make requests to the view’s endpoint, I am sometimes getting Response 1 (x bytes in size) and sometimes getting Response 2 (y bytes in size).

The view code is as follows:

class MyListView(generics.ListAPIView):
    model = MyListModel
    serializer_class = MyListSerializer
    pagination_class = PageNumberPagination
    pagination_class.page_size = 1000

    def get_queryset(self):
        region = self.kwargs.get('region')
        sort_param = '-date_created'
        return MyListModel.objects.filter(region=region).order_by(sort_param)

    @method_decorator(cache_page(2*60*60))
    def get(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return super().get(*args, **kwargs)

I’m not sure if this is relevant, but once a day, I run a cronjob which clears all cached views using the following code:

from django.core.cache import cache

cache.clear()

I have confirmed that the difference in response data from this endpoint is not due to the cache expiring and being replaced with new data. I have also confirmed that the data in the database for MyListModel is not being changed at all. I have also confirmed that the region parameter is consistent between requests.

I’m at a loss for how I could be getting 2 different responses from this endpoint. Cache or no cache, the underlying data is not changing so the response should be consistent. This leads me to believe that there is somehow 2 cached responses being held and sometimes Response 1’s cached data is being returned and sometimes Response 2’s cached data is being returned. But I still do not know by what mechanism this could possibly occur.