Re: decreased caching efficiency?

[Christian Kuhtz]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 11:59:58AM -0700, Travis Grant wrote:
[..]
> Commerce sites are also dependent on dynamic technology that cannot be
> cached. Although you will find sites that are entirely static (buy.com &
> etoys.com) you will generally find that these models are based on volume and
> that the majority of these sites have never seen a dollar in profit. However
> the profitable boutique type sites like eStyle.com, are entirely dynamic.
> Margins are protected by a contractual product line. When you place an
> order, a query verifies inventory prior to final checkout. In addition,
> product pages indicate whether items are in stock or not. You cant cache
> these types of sites. 
[..]

Each and every button, product image etc could be cached, regardless of the
dynamic nature of the website.  Images cost cycles, bw.

[..]
> Most caching implementations will cost way more than the bandwidth costs
> they avoid.

You get no argument there ;-).  I never felt that you could ever justify
caching in terms of bandwidth savings.  You can only justify in terms of
improving a users experience.  And in that sense, you are giving considerable
resources to a content origin, and a free service to them.

That's why the CDN strategy is much more attractive, where you have a hosting
relationship of some kind with the content origin.

[..]
> load on the DB servers. But TTLs will usually have to be set pretty low (2
> seconds) in order to do this and the technologies will have to be catered to
> web development environments (like cacheflow and ASP). 
[..]

Hmm, if you cache what I suggest above, that's not really neccessary... No?

Cheers,
Chris

-- 
Christian Kuhtz                                     Architecture, BellSouth.net
<ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm                       Atlanta, GA
                                                    "Speaking for myself only."