[8924] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: "Hits" pragma
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Masinter)
Wed Aug 16 12:59:24 1995
To: hedlund@best.com
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: Marc Hedlund's message of Wed, 16 Aug 1995 02:53:28 -0700 <v02120d00ac57683ac2fa@[204.156.156.16]>
From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 09:57:19 PDT
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
>If your position, though, is that the spec is the spec, 'Expires' should be
>used as written, samples are plenty good enough for hit counts, and
>enticements be damned....well, okay. I just don't think that's as
>practical a proposal if the goal is to change providers' behavior.
We're fooling ourselves if we think 'writing a spec' will change
provider's behavior. If you want to provide enticements, why not just
implement some good statistics gathering tools that allow periodically
turning off caching, and analyzing projections from the data so
gathered? It's a lot simpler than all of this fol-de-rol in the proxy
caches.
There's other kinds of sampling, too. For example, you could
selectively turn off caching for randomly assigned host addresses
e.g., hash the host name, and day k of a n-day cycle, turn off caching
for hosts whose hashed IP address mod n == k.
