Re: multiget reports Re: Thoughts on relation to WebDAV

Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> Helge Hess wrote:
>> ... Probably this was discussed before? Was the conclusion that
>> pipelining is a sufficient replacement? ...
> 
> Any kind of a batched GET defeats caching. So far I haven't seen 
> evidence that doing it will work better than just issuing many GET 
> requests.

Should caching really be such a big issue for protocol designers in this
modern world? My ISP has just announced that it is abandoning its
20-year-old web-cache, on the grounds that:

- In a broadband world, end-users don't perceive much benefit
- In a world of SSL, web-apps and sessions, caches don't work anyway
- You can't seriously expect to cache any useful propertion of
   multimedia content

The impact of web-caches on global bandwidth usage is presumably
marginal, nowadays; HTTP page requests must be a pretty small fraction
of general bandwidth usage. [No stats to hand - ed.]

-- 
Jack.