Bug#834282: ITP: squid-prefetch -- Simple page-prefetch for Squid3 web proxy
FYI: the concept of pre-fetching HTTP objects was designed to resolve
problems inherent in the HTTP/1.0 protocol. Where objects needed a
completely new fetch to be performed once they became stale.
Squid-2 packages being HTTP/1.0 software had this problem with caching
and the squid-prefetch package was relevant.
The world has since moved to using HTTP/1.1 where this problem has been
largely resolved by cache revalidation mechanisms. Additionally a
majority portion of the modern web content is dynamically generated and
the only thing prefetching does for this traffic is massively increase
bandwidth and server loadings. Effectively DoS'ing some services.
Squid-3 packages are HTTP/1.1 software and does not need the operations
performed by the squid-prefetch package. This is why the squid3 package
has never been linked to the squid-prefetch package and partly why the
removal request last year marked squid-prefetch as "obsolete".
Additionally there are some dangerous security implications from
automatically fetching URLs simply because they are mentioned in some
content that is wanted. User tracking and automated fetching of
advertising and malware to say the least.
Please do not prefetch or encourage its use in the modern Internet. The
problems outweigh the benefits.
Cheers
Amos Jeffries
The Squid Software Foundation
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