Re: Content-lengths of dynamic objects

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Tue, 9 May 1995 00:44:29 +0500


Caching is a bad idea for something that changes length every time
it's called. (Oh, quote-of-the-day, for example, or just the output
from a request form.) Waiting to cache something that will never be
needed again doesn't optimize anything, and adds unnecessary latency
to the transaction while the server generates all of the data.

I've noticed web sites that give the appearance of rapid response from
search requests by returning immediately the header (complete with
large inline usually-cached-by-the-client images) before actually
completing the search results.