Re: Apache-based caching for https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/debsecan/release/1/
* Stephen Gran:
> This one time, at band camp, Florian Weimer said:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I plan to switch the debsecan data source to URLs below:
>>
>> <https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/debsecan/release/1/>
>>
>> I don't know how much traffic this will generate eventually. Would it
>> be possible to tweak the mod_proxy settings so that the local Apache
>> server caches generated pages for a short period time (say, five
>> minutes), but only for URLs which start with
>> "https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/debsecan/release/1/";, e.g.
>> <https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/debsecan/release/1/sid>?
>
> mod_cache is a mildly complicated (and potentially dangerous) beast.
> Please have a look over
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_cache.html and linked pages
> (especially the caching guide).
Sure, those are the perils of caching.
> Let us know what content (if any, including headers) should be excluded
> from caches. Assume that we know nothing about your application,
> and ask advice if you're unsure if something should be cached or not.
> As I said, caching can be dangerous if misused - you can present one
> user's content to another user very easily. I don't think debsecan has
> that sort of problem, but you should consider if headers change the way
> your application responds and work with that idea in mind.
Everything below
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/debsecan/release/
is public and not client-dependent at all, so caching that will not
cause any trouble.
> We can tune it to only cache things at the mentioned path. Is
> there any reason we should be hard coding the expiry time of cache
> objects? Can you not set cache headers in the application?
debsecan doesn't set any caching headers, and the server side is not
very cache-friendly, either, because it does not supply Last-Modified
headers etc. We should change that eventually, but it's not a
priority right now.
I've uploaded a new version of debsecan with the
security-tracker.debian.org URL to unstable. Let's see how it goes
and apply the caching if needed.
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