

40-60% of Yahoo's users have an empty cache experience - nathanwdavis
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/

======
willwagner
We noticed this after finding an error in our apache config such that some of
our assets were set to be cached longer than we really wanted (30 days), much
to our chagrin. It turned out that even though you tell the browser to keep
something for a very long time, it most likely won't stay there.

Our general assumption was that it is due to the default cache size of
browsers being tiny in comparison to the amount of data that users now
consume, coupled with every webpage you visit putting stuff into the cache
(rightly so).

I believe the default cache of firefox is still set at 50mb which seems very
small.

~~~
Periodic
The default size for Firefox 3.0.12 on Ubuntu is indeed 50mb.

A fresh reload of CNN.com: 649 KB A fresh reload of YouTube.com: 113 KB A
fresh reload of CDW.com: 331 KB

That's still a lot of sites in a 50MB cache. though I imagine a single youtube
video would go a long way towards filling it up.

------
Jakob
Quoting the comments section:

    
    
        The best possible way to achieve cacheability of an object is to perform
        a server-side re-write of all linked content (images, scripts etc) and
        re-write the links to refer to a file name based off the MD5 hash of the
        file content.
        
        So, your link:
        http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/ww/beta/y3.gif
        is re-written:
        http://us.i1.yimg.com/never-expire/A31D5F12.gif
        Where A31D5F12 is the MD5 hash.
    

Does somebody use this convention? It seems logical but I haven't seen it
wildly used.

~~~
redorb
Does this mess up what the new 'semantic web markup' movement is pushing? ...
(I.e. google's image search uses the image name as a signal to what the image
might be, albeit a small signal)

~~~
lsb
It shouldn't, you can just have something like static.example.com/picture-of-
cat-playing-piano-0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.jpg

------
pohl
So does this constitute an indirect measurement of the size of the cache-savvy
porn-consuming population?

~~~
redorb
Perhaps browsers could have a white list that the user could modify and have a
select view sites avoid losing the cache even when clearing the cache from a
menu option...

 __I think it might constitute :)

~~~
mahmud
Firefox:

Tools->Start Private Browsing.

Comes handy when you're giving someone your laptop to surf and you don't want
them polluting your history (it distracts me when firefox auto-completes
something I don't recognize)

