Re: Squid and Communicator Part II

Dave Zarzycki wrote:

> >From what I have noticed, some web server admins don't like placing trust
> in caching servers to deliver the most up to date page. On the other

I don't think that's the real reason. The big reason most server
admins hate caches is that they cause the server logs to
under-report traffic levels. Any site that makes money out of
advertising gets paid according to page traffic. If they can do
anything to defeat caches and boost their traffic levels, they will.
It's more money in their pocket.

> again, I have had a hard time trying to convince my superiors/co-workers
> at school/work to use squid when the mentality is, "If it ain't broke,
> don't fix it!" Not to mention when I tell them that 2-8GB of disk and
> 64-256MB of RAM is needed... ;-)

That bit's easy. I found that blocking port 80 outbound on our router
convinced the most reluctant user that the cache was a good idea :-)

> Personal comment about Microsoft and Netscape (among the many web
> servers), who always have there documents expire instantly. They are
> relatively rich corporations who don't care how much bandwidth costs
> (it's cheap to them anyway), and more hits equals a bigger ego, just like
> the "my machine is faster than your machine..."

It's not an ego thing, it's real money. In fact I'm surprised more
web admins haven't taken steps to stop their pages being cached.
Bandwidth is cheap if you're making money out of traffic. It's just
another incremental expense which is more than covered by the
incremental revenue it generates.

<soapbox>What's needed (from a web site admin's point-of-view) is a
method to deliver cache information back upstream so that they know
how much traffic they've missed out on, so they can count it. The
admins don't really want the traffic (like everybody else, they only
want just enough bandwidth to deliver their service), but they want
to know about it. But if that's the only alternative, then they'll do
their best to get the traffic because it's worth more to them than it
costs them to get it.</soapbox>

-cheese (seeing both sides of the argument, running a few web sites
and also looking after Squid)

--
Mark Cheeseman  WebSource Pty Ltd  cheese@websource.com.au 
Tel +61 2 9936 8689  Fax +61 2 9955 8871  http://www.websource.com.au