Re: Caching temp redirects, was: proposed (minor) changes in squid

From: Marc van Selm <marc.van.selm@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 1997 08:47:01 +0100

Some final comments,

At 07:20 PM 10/1/97 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
>
>On Wed, 1 Oct 1997 carson@tla.org wrote:
>
>> No! If you start caching temporary redirects again and break the !@#$%$%
>> code I had to fix in squid way back when I'll...I'll...do something _really_
>> horrible!
>
>It's his own problem if he wants to do something like that.. I have all
>kinds of horrible strange hacks on my squid at home. But I know how to
>deal with them, so it's no prob.

Yep, in fact I only cache them for a few hours (8). The reason for this is
that our bandwidth is limited (384kbps, for about 400 users spread over 2
agencies). This is because bandwidth is costly for us. This hack improved
the hit-rate (and so the access-speed) for some very popular sites (here)
and no complaints are filed... (for example "http://www.telegraaf.nl" uses
this as a permanent redirect to
"http://www.telegraaf.nl/krant/vandaag/teksten/voorpagina.html". During busy
time it took 1 or 2 seconds to resolve the redirect and and fractions of a
second to get the cached pages. Users like quick response...)

>> You may _not_ cache temporary redirects. Ever. For any reason.

Correct! But as I said money/speed driven and only for a few hours.

>I dont think he was asking..

NO! THIS WAS A SIDELINE! I only mentioned it to describe the exotic hacks I
have. I only asked to limit udp_stale_hits to specific siblings and a
configurable hack for host names with '_' to make the proxy transparent (as
viewed from Netscape or MSIE)

>> Ok, well, maybe per-host, something like:
>> stupid_broken_temp_redirect_hosts: www.idiot.org

Great, Better, VERY GOOD! Can I ask for a acl in this case? I assume this is
more work and has some performance down-sides but this would be great!

>> But if you cache temp redirs in general, you break _many_ pages (like the NY
>> Times).

YEP, but in fact I don't support users to get fresh pages every half hour
because our internet bill (provider + lease line) is more than I earn per
month (and that's a nice figure already) and our budget is NOT very likely
to increase. (Besides this our personnel is not really paid to read the NY
Times)

Enough about this (I think) Again this is not something I want in the
squid-source. If it is - great - that saves me some hacking the next
upgrade. Cookies is more interesting here (Again a cache breaker on our
expense and I don't care that this defeats a servers user-profiling and they
can't get statistics to help their marketing.)

Marc
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Marc van Selm
NATO C3 Agency
Communication Systems Division, A-Branch
E-Mail: marc.van.selm@nc3a.nato.int
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Private: selm@cistron.nl, selm@het.net, http://www.cistron.nl/~selm
Received on Wed Oct 01 1997 - 23:50:22 MDT

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