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

    This is very interesting...  I wrote earlier that we need to
    distinguish between two kinds of demographic data:
    
    1) Hit counts
    
    2) User's Referer field, IP address, User-Agent field, ...
    
    The proposed hit counting mechanism allows you to get 1) for all user
    agents without cache busting, but not 2).  You seem to predict that
    most advertising sites will want to have 2) in future.  That would
    make the the proposed hit counting mechanism pretty ineffective at
    reducing cache busting.

This is not true.  For any field that appears in the client's
request headers (i.e., not "IP address" but definitely User-Agent),
you can obtain counts without cache-busting (which I would
define as "completely disabling caching").

E.g., suppose I (at an origin server) want to subdivide the count
based on User-Agent.  I would send "Vary: User-Agent" with my
responses, but I would still send the same Etag header with each
response.

So the first time the cache does a GET on the URL, e.g.,

	GET /foo.html HTTP/1.1
	User-Agent: Lynx
	Cache-control: use-count=0

I would reply

	HTTP/1.1 200 OK
	Etag: "abc"
	Vary: User-Agent
	Content-Length: 10000
	Cache-control: max-uses=1000
	[...]

Then when the cache receives another request from a Mosaic user, it
would send

	GET /foo.html HTTP/1.1
	User-Agent: Mosaic
	Cache-control: use-count=0
	If-None-Match: "abc"

and I would reply

	HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
	Etag: "abc"
	Cache-control: max-uses=1000

I.e., the cache now knows that it can use the entity with Etag = "abc"
for both Mosaic and Lynx User-agents, and that I want it to keep
separate counts based on User-agent.  Only one copy of the body
has been transmitted from the server to the cache, only one copy
is stored at the cache, and the cache need not do any more conditional
GETs unless new User-Agents appear.

If the proxy is "cooperative" (as we define in our proposal), then
when it finally removes this entity from its storage, it would have
to send

	HEAD /foo.html HTTP/1.1
	User-Agent: Lynx
	Cache-control: use-count=97

	HEAD /foo.html HTTP/1.1
	User-Agent: Mosaic
	Cache-control: use-count=13

(but of course these can be sent in one TCP packet, since we
are presumably using persistent connections).

-Jeff

Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 16:54:05 UTC