[thelist] Questions for web traffic gurus

Pete Freitag pf at cfdev.com
Tue Oct 9 10:02:00 CDT 2001


I think they are referring to special caching hardware (like
http://www.cacheflow.com/), and software caching proxy servers.  IIS may do
some caching of its own, but it will still log the request.

In the cases mentioned I think you have something like this...

browser sends request to site.com

a) the site has a hardware cache setup, and your request gets routed to the
cache, if the cache has a copy, it responds, if not it forwards the request
to the web server and the web server responds.

b) you have a proxy server setup and the proxy server saves a copy of the
site for you, or goes to the site and gets the new copy.


_____________________________________________
Pete Freitag (pfreitag at cfdev.com)
CFDEV.COM
ColdFusion Developer Resources
http://www.cfdev.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Green, Janet
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 10:38 AM
To: 'thelist at lists.evolt.org'
Subject: [thelist] Questions for web traffic gurus


A while back I posted a question about web traffic, and one of the responses
contained a link to a brief article about the unreliability of web stats.
Today I was reading that article in depth, and have a question. Here's what
it said (in part)...

"Most large commercial sites such as America Online... use large 'caches' on
the machines they use to service web requests. That means that once a user
looks up one of (their) pages, it hangs around in memory at that site in
case someone else wants to look at it. That way, things run faster... there
is no way whatsoever to determine exactly what effect this has on our
numbers - it could be a factor of two, it could be orders of magnitude.
Probably somewhere in the middle."

So I am wondering... is this still true? (The article was written in 1994.)
And, how do I find out if my in-house Windows NT/IIS server for
www.desmoinesmetro.com does this same thing (gives subsequent visitors
cached pages)? Are *my* reported numbers only a fraction of what Webtrends
tells me they are?

I'd be interested in hearing further discussion on the reliability (or lack
thereof) of web traffic statistics.

Thanks!
Janet

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