cache empties itself?

[Michael S. Fischer]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Ricardo Newbery <ric at digitalmarbles.com> wrote:

>  Well, first of all you're setting up a false dichotomy.  Not everything
> fits neatly into your apparent definitions of dynamic versus static.  Your
> definitions appear to exclude the use case where you have cacheable content
> that is subject to change at unpredictable intervals but which is otherwise
> fairly "static" for some length of time.

In my experience, you almost never need a caching proxy for this
purpose.  Most modern web servers are perfectly capable of serving
static content at wire speed.  Moreover, if your origin servers have a
reasonable amount of RAM and the working set size is relatively small,
the static objects are already likely to be in the buffer cache.  In a
scenario such as this, having caching proxies upstream for these sorts
of objects can actually be *worse* in terms of performance -- consider
the wasted time processing a cache miss for content that's already
cached downstream.

Best regards,

--Michael