Re: Let's talk strategy (Netscape's 75% figure)

On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Rich Wiggins wrote:
> 2) As mass-market utilities come on stream with their own Web browsers
> and with massive caching proxy services, statistics reported by server
> administrators will become increasingly more suspect. If 500,000 AOL
> users visit the White House home page, the server admin will see only
> one transaction that appears to come from users of the AOL browser --
> the cache will mask the other users' transactions.

Nope, at least not with the current setup.  There are something like 20 
separate AOL caches, apparently with different cache buffers, so you will 
see at least 20 "200" responses.  Furthermore the cache always sends IMS 
requests for non-image objects without Expires: headers, so you will be 
able to see individual requests.  Their proxy does cache without sending 
IMS for all image/* type files for something like 6-12 hours, though I'm 
not sure if that can be defeated by abusing Expires: or Pragma: no-cache.

Now, that doesn't mean at some point in the future (oh, say, when they 
take the browser out of beta!) they won't decide to start doing non-IMS 
caching; at that point, yes, the numbers will be smaller than actual.  
Hopefully by then we'll have a mechanism in HTTP for caches to report 
these hits at a later date....

	Brian

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Received on Wednesday, 2 August 1995 20:03:11 UTC