Christian, I invite you to www.photoloft.com Each album is dynamic and the site uses FlashPix technology. Have fun with it.

-----Original Message----- From: Christian Kuhtz [mailto:ck@arch.bellsouth.net] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 12:14 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: decreased caching efficiency?

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Commerce sites are also dependent on dynamic technology

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cached. Although you will find sites that are entirely static (buy.com & etoys.com) you will generally find that these models are

On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 11:59:58AM -0700, Travis Grant wrote: [..] that cannot be based on volume and

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that the majority of these sites have never seen a dollar in profit. However the profitable boutique type sites like eStyle.com, are entirely dynamic. Margins are protected by a contractual product line. When you place an order, a query verifies inventory prior to final checkout. In addition, product pages indicate whether items are in stock or not. You cant cache these types of sites. [..]

Each and every button, product image etc could be cached, regardless of the dynamic nature of the website. Images cost cycles, bw.

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Most caching implementations will cost way more than the bandwidth costs they avoid.

You get no argument there ;-). I never felt that you could ever justify caching in terms of bandwidth savings. You can only justify in terms of improving a users experience. And in that sense, you are giving considerable resources to a content origin, and a free service to them.

That's why the CDN strategy is much more attractive, where you have a hosting relationship of some kind with the content origin.

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load on the DB servers. But TTLs will usually have to be set pretty low (2 seconds) in order to do this and the technologies will have to be catered to web development environments (like cacheflow and ASP). [..]

Hmm, if you cache what I suggest above, that's not really neccessary... No?

Cheers, Chris

-- Christian Kuhtz Architecture, BellSouth.net <ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Atlanta, GA "Speaking for myself only."