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Dominic Mitchell dom at happygiraffe.net
Tue Feb 7 14:45:25 GMT 2006


On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 01:45:16PM +0000, Jacqui Caren wrote:
> Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> >One more thing...  For feeds, it's generally a better idea to write to a
> >file and then just let Apache serve the file.  This is because Apache
> >knows how to do stuff like If-Modified-Since, ETags, gzip encoding and
> >the rest, which can bring large bandwidth savings.  Otherwise you have
> >to implement it all yourself, which is boring and wasteful.
> 
> A lot of this (not all) in Apache 2 is available to CGI and MP2.
> Ignoring this, you are right that low (relatively static) data should be 
> in files.
> If nothing else, If-Modified-Since is a major plus that is usually a 
> bugger (and often a waste of time) to implement dynamically.

It's not _too_ difficult with mod_perl.  So long as you have a clear
idea of what the Last-Modified time actually is (not always that easy).
But it is really one more thing that the web server should be doing for
you.

And once you start thinking about these things, you start to realise
about the need for per-user URLs in order to get the caching correct...

Lately I've been thinking that I really need to design the URL structure
of an application before even writing code.  *sigh*

-Dom


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