Re: Querystring vs. Squid Cacheserver

>>>>> On Tue, 02 Mar 1999 10:49:44 +0100, Ole Moller <olm@cybercity.dk> said:

> Written by you 10:04 02-03-99 +0100,Andreas J. Koenig
>> If people installing squid really follow that recommendation, all my
>> careful considerations about Last-Modified and Expires headers are
>> worthless because *all* my URIs contain questionmarks.

> I really dont see the point. Either a web-page is static or it's dynamic

The classical answer by J.M.Keynes to that is, in the long run we're
all dead. No. A page is not either static or dynamic. That's why I
carefully consider what the Expires header should say.

> and in the last case it is likely to change every time (eg a counter) or it
> is unlikely that the same request is requested twice (eg searches on
> altavista).

I have heard that seaches on search engines do accumulate around the
word sex and other words from the same corner.

> You dont tell what your script really do, but if it has a finite
> possibilities of input variables and a finite output pages (as I suppose
> because you want the pages cached), then you should consider to make a
> script that dumps all the possible pages one time for all as static pages,
> with the appropriate headers.

I'm serving city maps. While the number of output pages is circa
infinite for all practical purposes, they accumulate around the same
places.

Dumping all possible pages with appropriate headers is exactly the
opposite of what I want to do. I believe you missed my point. I
believe, I _am_ sending the appropriate headers, that is, I behave as
if I had already written infinite many pages to my infinite disk. My
handler simulates what you are suggesting. I eliminate the
questionmark and suddenly all ignorant cacheservers cache me.

I have already found my answer, I _will_ use the handler I posted in
my other message and I will recommend it for broader use.

> If this is not possible - then this is truly a cgi-script that I dont want
> to cache because I dont have infinite disk-space.

I'm talking about a thing where a cache server makes a lot of sense
and _I_ do behave cache-friendly. But if cache maintainers ignore the
headers just because there is a question mark in the URL, they behave
not cache-friendly. That's not rational, so I believe, the
recommendation in the squid.conf is bogus.

-- 
andreas