difference between MSIE and NS?

I'm not sure that this is the right place to ask this, but here goes:

I administer a small WAN for a county-wide library system. We have
recently downgraded from a full T-1 to a fractional at 384K. Naturally I
wanted to make the best use of bandwidth as possible for our patrons who
come in and use our 20 internet accessible workstation to browse the WWW.

Squid 1.1.8 has been running very well for us. But there is one
workstation which seems to generate nearly 25% of our entire traffic. The
only difference is that this one workstation is configured with Internet
Explorer 3.02 as opposed to Netscape 3.01 which is installed on the other
19 workstations. In both cases we use a proxy auto-config file which
basically states "Go use our Squid proxy unless it is down, then go direct"

Does Netscape give up more quickly on our Squid cache than MSIE?

I've been watching this for over two weeks and our staff doesn't notice
anything unusual going on at that machine, yet each day when I check the
access.logs with some stats scripts, it's the busiest machine on the floor.
 Not always 25%, but always at least 15%.
Received on Wed Apr 30 1997 - 22:03:16 MDT