Firewalls/Proxies and client browser caches

[Don Turnbull <donturn () fis utoronto ca>]

As I'd mentioned before, one of my main interests in using
firewalls/proxies are to understand what users are really doing on the
Web. I've become interested in discovering if there is an expected ratio
of hits that each browser's local cache satisfies before a query is
again sent to the firewall or proxy server.

Many studies suggest that the "Back" button on the browser is used far
above any other function, and with a local cache of reasonable size and
a Web page of reasonable size, it's assumed that many requests for pages
are served by the local cache on each client machine.

Aside from a commentary on Web navigation and how it affects Web access
speed. I'm curious if there is anything I can do to either tune my proxy
knowing that local cache takes some of the burden off my server, or
something I might be able to do at a client level (in deploying a custom
configured browser to users) to help increase performance.

I'm also assuming here that firewall products don't record requests that
the client cache fulfils.

Just a problem in search of an idea of a solution.

--
-------------------------
Don Turnbull
donturn () fis utoronto ca
http://donturn.fis.utoronto.ca/