HTTPS-everywhere vs. proxy caching

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Fri May 3 19:06:31 UTC 2013


It occurs to me that I don't believe I've seen any discussion of the 
Unexpected Consequence of pervasive HTTPS replacing HTTP for unauthenticated
sessions, like non-logged-in users browsing sites like Wikipedia.

That traffic's not cacheable, is it?  Proxy caches on services like 
mobile 3/4G, or smaller ISPs, or larger corporations can't cache it, I
wouldn't think, which means both that they will see traffic increases,
and that the end sites will as well.

Has this been discussed and I missed it?  Do I improperly understand
transparent caching?  Or is this just a bomb waiting to go off?

I assume that Wikipedia themselves are on top of the idea that their
in-house reverse-proxies won't be carrying that traffic (though I don't 
actually know what their architecture looks like anymore), but..

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274




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