Digex transparent proxying

Sat Jun 27 12:07:46 UTC 1998

On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:

> And as soon as people doing advertising actually do this, then the proxy
> becomes less useful, leading proxy owners to ignore the headers so that their
> multi-thousand-dollar investments in these things are not wasted and
> actually HURT performance (performance for the FIRST fetch through a proxy
> is SLOWER - it HAS TO BE, since the proxy must first get the data before it
> can pass it on).

If a proxy owner ignores expires heades than as I said he/she/it better
understand what is going on and what he/she/it is doing - they are
potentially causing harm to their end users.  Data on most caches is fed
as it comes in - in other words as soon as it has the item it writes to
disk and serves it to the end user. There will more than likely be *some*
added latency to the transaction (but we're talking in the milliseconds
for normal transactions).  However, subsequent fetches from the cache for
that data will be considerably quicker in quite a few more instances.

> And how do you guarantee that the proxy server is parsing the tags and not
> ignoring them?

Hold on hit the brakes there Karl ma boy - I DID NOT SAY - that the proxy
server will parse the tags - most can and do NOT parse the tags - that
would slow them down to a crawl while they waste valuable resources
parsing html - What I said is to make sure that your content provider (who
is serving your (the site designer's) site parse html on teh SERVER - so
that the cache/proxy will see it as an appropriate HTTP header - then you
have no problem

> See, that's the problem.

Nope see above...

> Proxies are fine WHERE CUSTOMERS HAVE AGREED TO THEIR USE.

Yup you have to agree to use a proxie (it requires you to set it in your
browser) a transparant cache is another story - and IMHO TRANSPARENT
caches have their place closer to the enduser - they can be a problem if
placed to far up the ladder.

> STEALING someone's packet flow to force it through a proxy is NOT fine.

huh? NEUMAN! you got me there!!!

--
I am nothing if not net-Q! - ras at poppa.clubrich.tiac.net