On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Brett Glass wrote:
One could always do a "HEAD" first. It would be worth it in terms of time,
especially if the result was remembered for awhile.
Have you ever tried doing HEAD to an IIS server with server-side-includes
enabled? And there is by far worse examples around..
If the cache can revert to forwarding the request, there should not be a
problem.
In the world of HTTP there is always problems. Not so much due to HTTP as
such, but mainly due to lots of people abusing HTTP (including range
requests) for other purposes than it is intended for.
Would probably help if some large ISPs tried to talk them to senses,
but I suppose their preferred solution would be to simply set up an
Akamai at the ISP..
Akamai refuses to talk to us. Won't even return phone calls. Unless
you're a huge ISP, they won't give you the time of day. (Which begs the
question, "How can you ever become one if your bandwidth is all consumed
by Windows Update?" The answer, of course, is that you must cache on
your own.)
I referred to talking to Microsoft here, explaining that also smaller ISPs
who don't have an Akamai at their core network is in need for some
reasonable Windows Update distribution method.
Regards
Henrik
