Re: "Hits" pragma

>This is about halfway there - *every* client of ours wants stats as to 
>the busiest time of day for their sites (even to particular parts of 
>their site) and it doesn't let us analyse "clickstreams" using either 
>pathway heuristics or RequestID info.[1]

What some Web providers fail to understand is that they don't need
to defeat caching every minute of every day of the year in order
to get an estimate of the number of visitors, or a significant sample
of clickstreams.

If that data is needed, just set up a couple cache-free days per
month per service.  With a little statistical analysis, you will
get a far more accurate survey of user preferences than is achieved
by most marketing surveys, and at the same time you will improve
the average performance of your site.

Assuming the cache-free days are distributed randomly, this would
be considered "socially acceptable" behavior on the part of the
service provider, since everyone understands that they need to
make a living.

 ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
                      Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
                      (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)

Received on Sunday, 13 August 1995 15:05:44 UTC