Re: FRCA

From: Wayne McAlpine

Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2007 4:48 PM
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, that is an absolutely perfect example. I am impressed both with the
concept and the implementation. One big question: you use what is in effect
a GET method on your queries (the values are strung together on the actual
URL itself). Is this required, or can FRCA also recognize and cache POST
type requests?

Joe