"Hits" pragma

Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com> writes:
> One thing that would encourage the use of Expires:
> headers of course would be a way for caches to report hits
> they served directly without a long-distance conditional GET.

How about using an additional pragma directive

	Pragma: hits = 35

to denote the accumulated number of unforwarded requests received  
by a proxy, in addition to the request being forwarded.  Multiple  
"hits" directives make sense, and can be accumulated by intermediate  
proxies.

Using this pragma, hit counts will be accurate over time intervals  
on the order of the expiration interval of the resource (which is  
tunable by the server).

This proposal requires only minimal changes to caches, servers, and  
log analysis tools -- and offers a graceful, incremental upgrade  
path  in the meantime (since Pragma headers are already passed  
through by any conforming proxy).  Performance of all components is  
practically unchanged since no additional network connections are  
used.  And perhaps most important for successful adoption, this  
scheme avoids imposing any burdensome reporting duties (such as  
"accounting batch runs") on proxy maintainers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Burchard	<burchard@cs.princeton.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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Received on Friday, 11 August 1995 20:07:36 UTC