Re: Possible optimization to State-Info proposal

Dave Kristol (dmk@allegra.att.com)
Fri, 25 Aug 95 10:02:32 EDT 

Shel Kaphan <sjk@amazon.com> wrote:
  > I mentioned this before, obliquely in a response on another topic, but
  > if I'm right, what follows can significantly reduce the potential
  > performance problems with DMK's State-Info proposal.
  >                                             Key conclusion: An
  > idempotent request such as GET, which produces no side effects, cannot
  > affect the state of a stateful dialog.  Therefore, it seems
  > unnecessary for requests that can be satisfied out of a cache to pass
  > through any information to the next server.
  > 
  > This, of course, makes it even more imperative that caches not serve
  > cached documents they shouldn't.
  > 
  > With the recent addition to the proposal that clients stay in the
  > "have state-info" state when there is no state-info in the server's
  > (or cache's) response, this means that caches need not "reflect"
  > state-info either.

This idea sounds promising.  Let me expand a bit from an operational
standpoint.  Remember the recent change whereby a user agent retains
its State-Info if it receives no State-Info from a server.  If caching
proxies followed the rule that they cached only those documents for
which they received no State-Info from the origin server, and if origin
servers were careful to send State-Info only when it changed, I believe
caching proxies would be able to cache anything cachable (in the
State-Info context).

Upon getting a one, a caching proxy could satisfy a request for a
resource from the cache if there were a fresh one available, whether or
not the request contained a State-Info request header.  (That's a
change, and it would indeed enhance caching.)


The idea of an idempotent method could be expanded to imply that, not
only does the resource not change, but its State-Info does not change
either.  (I guess that's obvious if you bundle State-Info into a
larger concept of "the resource".)

Nice idea!  If the dust settles without major objections, I'll add this
to a state-info-01 I-D.  That will be a couple of weeks, after some
vacation.

Dave Kristol