What does it take for a question to appear on the front page

Question

I just asked a question and then refreshed the site by clicking on the name in the upper left. My question didn't show up at the top? It was there when I clicked the 'Questions' link, but not on the main site. A few minutes later, I checked again (clicking the site name) and then there was my question, with 1 view. Perhaps this applies to all the SE sites, but what does it take for a question to appear in the "top questions"? What if no one is looking at the "all questions" page, and my questions gets missed? This probably wouldn't matter on a high traffic site, but for slower sites it might be an issue.

EDIT Same thing happened here on meta, my question isn't there on the home site, only when looking at all the questions.

EDIT2 Confirmed, a question only appears on the home site when it has at least one view. Not sure why this is, or if it should be adjusted for low traffic sites

Answer 1

There is caching for frontpage. Questions page is not cached. For frontpage you will wait a few minutes for the cache to timeout for seeing newer questions.

You can test too see cache times of pages. Tag pages (http://meta.homebrew.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/<tag>) are not cached so you can follow new posts from there too.

meta.stackoverflow have an answer about cached pages and cached items on pages in here. Since all SX sites uses those settings (AFAIK), that is also true for here.