Re: FRCA

Joe, we've been running FRCA on our election results pages for several years now and I've been very pleased with it. It caches thousands of cgi-generated pages and serves them from the cache if they have not expired. If I recall correctly, the expiry is set at two minutes.

On a busy election night, we get a million plus hits in a four-hour period. We were forced into using FRCA as word of the availability of the service spread and our volume skyrocketed. Our system (a model 740) was quickly overwhelmed as the volume increased. FRCA solved that handily.

There is a redbook available on configuring the HTTP server that includes a section of FRCA. I'd be happy to share our server configuration with you off-list.

Here's a link to one of the cached pages. If you hit the browser refresh button, you'll see that the timestamp stays the same. One caveat: Netscape and Firefox don't send a refresh request like IE does. Instead, they send a reload request, so FRCA doesn't work for them. I haven't found a way to disable the reload button on Firefox, but more than 80% of the hits we get are from IE so, as a practical matter, it solved our problem.

http://www400.sos.louisiana.gov:8090/cgibin/?rqstyp=elcms2&rqsdta=102007

Wayne


Joe Pluta wrote:

Does anybody know if FRCA is hardware-limited or available to any machine
running a recent release of i5/OS? I'm toying with the idea of enabling
FRCA on my model 270, but I don't know if it's even possible, and if it is
whether it makes sense to do so.

I haven't found a lot of real documentation on requirements for FRCA.

Joe