Re: New document on "Simple hit-metering for HTTP"

Paul Leach:
>>From:  koen@win.tue.nl[SMTP:koen@win.tue.nl]
>>
>>I can't see much difference, as far as efficiency is concerned,
>>between your proposed use of the Vary header and max-age=0 cache
>>busting.  Both as are inefficient, but at least max-age=0 is
>>inefficient in a non-complex way.
>
>I think you need to read about how Vary works.

I know how vary works.  I expect that service providers would send

  Vary: Accept, Accept-Language, User-Agent, Referer, From

or even

  Vary: *

under your scheme.  The latter is equivalent to max-age=0. Even the
former this gives you so much variance that cachability is effectively
eliminated.  Also, the it is at least questionable whether cache
implementers will actually implement all optimisations allowed by
Vary.

>Just to get terms straight: I define "max-age=0" as cache-busting.
>Better than no-cache, but still cache busting.

Then our terminology is in sync.

>>
>>To do a good job at giving demographers the complete request data
>>(including client IP address) they seem to want, a completely
>>different mechanism is needed.
>
>Aren't you arguing out of both sides of your mouth here.

No, I changed my mind after reading the messages from Erik Aronesty.
I no longer think that providers who *only* want hit counts are in the
majority.

> In the last
>message, you claimed that providers are too unsophisticated to know the
>difference between counts of conditional and unconditional GETs.

For the record, I claimed that the *customers* of providers would not
know the difference.

I have outlined a number of problems in your proposal.  The bottom
line is that I don't think it will work in its current form.  I'm
still moderately interested in getting a working lightweight
demographics mechanism, and will wait and see if the next draft
improves things.

Koen.

Received on Monday, 12 August 1996 16:03:04 UTC