Re: Hit-metering: to Proposed Standard?

Koen Holtman wrote:
> Jeffrey Mogul:
> >As we wrote, we have strong evidence that certain large customers are
> >eager to deploy this extension.
> 
> So who are these customers?  Proxy cache vendors?  Proxy cache
> operators?  Eagerness in origin server vendors/operators alone would
> not necessarily convince me that this protocol extension will be
> deployed.

All of the above.  This statement is backed up by continuous
overwhealming demand for this feature from lots of Netscape Proxy
customers.

The need obviously originates from origin server operators, as they
need their true statistics for billing based on ad exposure etc.  I
think most people would agree that they are entitled to that
information.

Some content providers (1) pressure online service providers and other
proxy operators to give them their statistics.  Others (most) simply
(2) disable caching intentionally.

(1) forces some large online service providers to run an up-to-date
check for every file in their cache for every access, which increases
latencies and wastes resources on their already otherwise busy
servers, somewhat defeating the benefits that they are trying to gain
by running proxy.

(2) defeats the whole caching idea.

Netscape, in all these roles (Proxy cache vendor, origin server
vendor, and a content provider), is eager to see this issue reach
consensus, so we can support it in our software.  In my opinion this
is one of the hottest items that the Working Group should solve in the
immediate future.  It has been deferred far too long already.

Cheers,
--
Ari Luotonen	* * * Opinions my own, not Netscape's * * *
Netscape Communications Corp.		ari@netscape.com
501 East Middlefield Road		http://home.netscape.com/people/ari/
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA		Netscape Proxy Server Development

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 1996 04:02:18 UTC