[lug] Safely Parsing PHP Parameters

[Zan Lynx]

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 14:58 -0600, dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
[snip]
> i'd actually recommend that you do NOT cache in this manner unless you
> have oodles of traffic.  it's not worth the hastle and the performance
> will be negligble for light loads which the majority of websites usually
> encounter.

I'd like to take every web author that takes this advice and shake them
by the neck.

Caching helps the user just as much as the site owner.  As a site user I
don't care about your bandwidth bill.  I care about how long it takes to
load your pages.

At home I have a relatively slow connection.  Caching helps a lot!  I do
not want to reload every old image whenever I visit (the archives of a
web comic, for example).  I have a 40 GB squid cache for a *reason*.

In a situation like this, think of clicking the Next link several times.
Without any caching, the whole page reloads.  (1.5s on modem) With IMS
caching, there is a server round-trip (150-300 ms on modem).  With
Expires caching, no server response is needed and Next clicks will load
as quickly as possible (~20 ms), assuming that the page was already in
cache (and link rel=prefetch can even assure this on Firefox).

Squid even takes Expires into account when determining how long to hold
objects in cache.  IMS objects get shorter times.

Waiting for your site design to stabilize is a good reason.  But it is
relatively painless (or it should be) to rename a directory and update a
PHP variable to go from one version of the site to another.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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