[tech] Questions about cache

[Philip Linde]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2020 14:40:55 -0800
Stephen <stephen at drsudo.com> wrote:

> Is there some guarantee that a capsule writer has on what may _not_ be 
> cached, or is it entirely up to the client's discretion? If the latter, 
> is this something which could be clarified in the spec? My impression 
> from this ML was that caching is frowned upon (except for perhaps 
> navigating back and forth through your history), but this has not been 
> my experience (at least with amfora).

It is at the clients discretion by my reading; it's not brought up at
all in the spec. In general it's probably best for the client to avoid
caching, at least by default. According to Stephane's statistics page¹,
most documents are typically rather small anyway (but perhaps some of
the larger ones are more popular...)

The main cost is establishing a connection and the TLS handshake,
where the client and server have to do some back-and-forths and will
spend a lot of time just waiting for responses. For this reason I
personally prefer to use caching liberally, at least for the duration
of my session. There are some applications that will break as a result,
but I don't tend to use them myself.

I think that no-caching-by-default should be suggested as a best
practice in the best practices document.

1: gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi

-- 
Philip
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