Re: Proxy problems

On Tue 23 Jul, 1996, stephen white <steve@adam.com.au> wrote:
>I received the following message from one of my users:
>
>From: Jack Miller
>Subj: Proxies
>
>[...]
>
>The proxie should work by connecting to the desired page via Internet,
>checking the page's date with the date on it's stored copy and if it has
>the latest copy stored, send that to the user, stopping the transfer from
>the Internet. If it doesn't have the latest copy of the page, it should
>download the latest copy, pass it on and store it.

it's a trade off. If the proxy did this every time someone requests
a document, most of the time you wouldn't get any benefit (small
gifs, etc) because you'd have increased latency. Additionally,
we're trying to save bandwidth as well as improve things for end
users (and by reducing unnecessary traffic, we improve the network
response for the essential requests and traffic).

how it really should work, as Duane keeps pointing out, is that
people responsible for content should use Expires: headers if they
know that the data has a finite lifetime. Clearly a TV schedule
or whatever does have one. I've seen some attempts to do this
by using META HTTP-EQUIV, but this won't be read nor seen by proxies.

Servers really need to be improved to support this sort of thing
though, but I see that the latest Apache release finally has support
for adding meta-data/headers to outgoing documents.

-- jrg.
Received on Tue Jul 23 1996 - 04:19:18 MDT