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Message-ID: <41114C70.3000704@web.turner.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:52:00 -0400
From: Brian Akins <bakins@web.turner.com>
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To: dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mod_disk cached fixed
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Bill Stoddard wrote:

> This is the area in which mod_cache is most broken. It does not handle 
> vary at all, thus the content needs to be stored before it is touched 
> by any filters. But that doesn't work either because some filters will 
> not properly run when serving content out of a quick_handler (ie, they 
> might rely on some special something happening in the fixups hook for 
> instance). Can't recall any exact scenarios right off the top of my 
> busy brain but I know they exist. Would be real good to get this fixed 
> in 2.2


So, basically, we would need to parse Vary headers and, possibly, store 
mulitple versions of the same uri.  The vary header should just be 
Header names.

Possible scenerio:

Serving cached content:

-  lookup uri in cache (via md5?).
-  check varies - a list of headers to vary on
- caculate new key (md5) based on uri and clients value of these headers
- lookup new uri in cache
- continue as normal

Caching an object:
-see if object has been cached before by looking up uri in cache
-do the Vary's match?
    -no, discard old entry(?) and create new uri entry
    -yes, generate new key based on client values
-continue as normal


Also, if there are no Vary's on an object, there is no second key/entry.

Sound reasonable?

The thing that sucks is if you vary on User-Agent.  You wind up with a 
ton of entries per uri.  I cheated in another modules by "varying" on an 
environmental variable.  Kind of like this:

BrowserMatch ".*MSIE [1-3]|MSIE [1-5].*Mac.*|^Mozilla/[1-4].*Nav" no-gzip

and just "vary" on no-gzip (1 or 0), but this may be hard to do just 
using headers...

-- 
Brian Akins
Senior Systems Engineer
CNN Internet Technologies