Re: Content-lengths of dynamic objects

Jared Rhine (Jared_Rhine@hmc.edu)
Tue, 9 May 1995 03:43:29 +0500


[Citation date: Mon, 8 May 1995 21:41:10 PDT]
LM == Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

LM> Caching is a bad idea for something that changes length every time
LM> it's called. (Oh, quote-of-the-day, for example, or just the output
LM> from a request form.) Waiting to cache something that will never be
LM> needed again doesn't optimize anything, and adds unnecessary latency
LM> to the transaction while the server generates all of the data.

Granted, but I'm not entirely sure of the connection you're trying to make.
For the most part, my dynamically generated objects don't change length or
content and it's ok to cache them. For the ones that do change every time,
I add an Expires header to the response to let know caching mechanisms now
not to cache it. Unfortunately, my tests indicate that Netscape doesn't
handle the Expires header properly :(

-- 
Jared_Rhine@hmc.edu / HMC / <URL:http://www.hmc.edu/~jared/home>

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