Re: "Hits" pragma

Roy Fielding (fielding@beach.w3.org)
Tue, 15 Aug 1995 21:17:41 -0400


>> 1) Most servers won't care about that data, so it is sending
>> unnecessary information.
>
>I disagree - I think *all* servers would be interested in that data. Who
>do you know who runs a server and doesn't care how many hits they get?

All of the ones within reach of me -- www.ics.uci.edu, www.w3.org,
and a few other less public ones. Hits received on the server are
important for load reasons (which is why I wrote wwwstat). Hits
received on the proxy are amusing, but not necessary for anyone
operating a non-marketing-oriented service.

I'm not sure if that qualifies under "most" anymore, but it did
the last time I checked.

>> 2) The last action of a cache does not involve a request to
>> the origin server, so there is no request on which you
>> can bundle the last set of information.
>
>This is true. Perhaps at cache-flush time some sort of bulk reporting
>mechanism can take place, where every URI at www.organic.com is reported
>on in one transaction to www.organic.com. Paul, want to revise the
>proposal? Yes, it unfortunately is one of those "batch reporting"
>mechanisms we'd like to avoid, but if the cache flushing is done often
>enough it might not be hard, and the justification for asking caches to
>perform this would be "to be a responsibly cooperative net.entity".

If you are already doing one batch report, why not do all the reports
that way? The larger the report, the better encryption you get.

>> timestamp HT domain HT [anonymous-id] HT [referer]
>>
>> would be just fine, with domain being defined by the proxy.
>
>What's HT? and is the record above on a per-hit basis or aggregate?

Horizontal Tab (I was speaking BNF-ish), and on a per-hit basis.

....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)