Digex transparent proxying

Karl Denninger karl at mcs.net
Sat Jun 27 15:32:02 UTC 1998


On Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 06:22:07AM -0400, Rich Sena wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
> 
> > As soon as that happens widely the cache is useless (or worse) and therefore
> > people who use them have a reason to ignore the Expires headers.
> 
> Sure if "everything" on the site is tagged as dynamic or is pre-expired
> then what is the point of caching at all - but "everything" doesn't need
> to be for caching and hit-stats to coexist - just count your hits on one
> item, just leave those items that ABSOLUTELY must be dynamic be dynamic -
> and items that should be updated daily - should have the correct expires
> date set - so that IMS can work to their advantage.

That doesn't work, since the meta-tag is on the PAGE, not the element (which
technically doesn't exist and is a figment of the server's imagination)

Therefore, any page which has a non-cacheable element (ie: an ad or
time-sensitive data) must be marked non-cachable.

Congratulations - you just specified that any shtml or asp page must be
marked non-cachable, along with any time-sensitive or advertiser-sponsored
page.

If that actually happens, then the proxy server operators will start
shutting off recognition of the headers, and now we're right back where 
we started, along with the performance problems that this causes (forcing
the traffic through a proxy server for EACH access actually HURTS
performance, not helps it).

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