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@poppa.clubrich.tiac.net