Dynamic Webpages not caching . . . www.allensmith.net

Regardless of how a Webpage is actually created and maintained, dynamic Webpages are appropriate only when the page content either could or does constantly change. Otherwise, it is best if the page that comes from the Web server has nothing to even suggest it might have been dynamically generated . . . to ensure it will not be excluded from appropriate proxy caching. (And not excluded from appropriate Search Engine indexing.)

Overseas Visitors

In the years since the below quote was written, transatlantic transfer speeds have improved tremendously. However, compared to a Web server or proxy cache located in the same geographical area, it is still very common to get a significantly slower transfer speed when directly accessing an overseas Web server.

Good Overseas Response Times Require Caching
Christian Weisgerber writes:

"Individual experience may vary depending on the part of the world you live at and the network infrastructure there, but I don't feel that server performance itself is the much of a problem in this context. What is? All those dynamically generated pages can't be cached. Elaborate proxy hierarchies are turned useless. Those documents must be pulled from the original server each and every time. The folks there can set up a big server park to handle the requests instantly but they can't do anything about choke points elsewhere. Many transatlantic links are saturated. It doesn't matter whether the server takes 0.01s, 0.1s, 1s, or even 10s to answer the request, when you're getting the data at 100 bytes/s. Which is just all too common.

"I appreciate the possibilities offered by dynamically created pages, but as an author it is important to realize that you may force your users to pull data through the eye of a needle from the other side of the globe, data that might otherwise be available in a snap from a nearby proxy cache."

Readers' Comments on the new Top-10 Design Mistakes

Small Office or Home Network Visitors

A second situation where caching can be critical to good webpage response times, is the small office or home network using a low-end Internet connection-- where this Internet connection comes directly into a server providing a proxy cache. (For example Microsoft ISA server, or some Linux based firewall and proxy cache set-up.)

These local on-site cache servers are often much less sophisticated than the dedicated cache servers on the Internet. So many local proxy programs will immediately exclude any URL containing a "?", all files ending with a file extension used by dynamically generated Webpages (such as ".asp" or ".php"), etc..

This in turn not only slows down the re-loading of any "not cached" page, but the bandwidth needed to check or reload a file-- that could have been cached in the local proxy server-- continues to take away from the limited bandwidth available to other users and applications.

Good Response Times and Caching

Overseas Visitors

Small Office or Home Network Visitors