RE: A More Aggressive Approach to Caching

As the tools for building dynamic sites get better this becomes less of an
issue. I can only speak from my own experience, but on a site running on
NT, with IIS (Microsoft's web server) using active server pages, the
default is for all static content to contain the correct expires headers
and for all .asp files to be generated with expires=date and the
cache=private (I think that's the name of the cache header, I forget
exactly).

I assume that caches will ignore the cookie - otherwise you are right, gif
images and static HTML might otherwise be thrown out of the cache.
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Baxter [SMTP:arb@connect.com.au]
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 1996 4:36 PM
To: James Gwertzman
Cc: 'ircache@nlanr.net'; 'squid-users@nlanr.net'
Subject: Re: A More Aggressive Approach to Caching

>>> James Gwertzman wrote
> Hits alone are not enough. They want to build relationships with
individual
> customers, tailoring their message to specific users based on user
profile
> data, demographics, etc. Building web sites is all about driving off-line
> sales for most companies, and to justify their investment they want to
have
> as much control as possible over the marketing messages or campaigns that

This is all well and good, and if sites were set to do this correctly,
this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

But how many of these sites are prepared to spend the time making sure
that
it's only the dynamic pages that have {cookies/bogus expires/generated
URLs},
and not the static stuff, such as images, corporate information, and other
junk that doesn't need to be dynamic?

I don't know of any...

For poorly configured sites (p*thfinder, anyone?) I'd say that degrading
their
QoS is a perfectly appropriate thing to do.

Anthony
Received on Tue Dec 17 1996 - 17:15:47 MST