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Re: LYNX-DEV Optimizing relative URLs
From: |
Klaus Weide |
Subject: |
Re: LYNX-DEV Optimizing relative URLs |
Date: |
Wed, 23 Oct 1996 19:29:36 -0500 (CDT) |
On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Al Gilman wrote:
> Lately I have been following the lynx-dev discussion by browsing
> the archive. When you spend that much time wandering around one
> weakly-served site, you notice things. Like the time spent
> repeating name lookup each time you move between pages at the
> same site.
>
> I have been able to speed up my own meandering around the archive
> by perhaps 30-40% by starting with an URL which has an IP number
> for the host path. Because I am navigating with relative URLs
> around the site, I pick up appreciable speed by the time not
> spent repeating name lookup.
>
> This suggest two possible avenues of optimization:
>
> Rob could use IP-number URLs in the root page at
> lynx.browser.org for at least the Lynx-dev
> Archive and the Lynx Enhanced Pages. This would
> accelerate the navigation at those sites for people
> finding their way thence from lynx.browser.org [or
> caching a bookmark from a visit started thus].
>
> Lynx itself could cache the IP number form of host-path
> as part of BASE when known, and use it in the construction
> of synthesized URLs relative to this BASE. This
> introduces failures on the odd chance that the IP node
> serving a domain name changes during the lifetime of
> a BASE memory in Lynx [perhaps not our most prevalent
> failure mode]. This would offer some speedup for all
> navigation via relative URLs.
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to plug in my daily piece on
libwww5 :).
The new version of the Reference Library has a hostname cache that
does what you propose - including automatically expiring the
cached entried after a configurable time, and automatic selection
of the "best" address (fastest response) if a name happens to have
more than one IP addresses (lie for example www.w3.org.
It doesn't have anything to do with BASE tags though, or with synthesising
URLs. It is just a shortcut avoiding to actually do repeated lookups
of the same names.
You also point out correctly a problem with that: that remembered lookup
results may become stale. This would be a problem with sites which
for some reson change their addresses rapidly. The Library does't
follow the requirement that such a cache must take the TTL (time to live)
of DNS records into account.
> Both of these are armchair punditry because I am not in a
> position to Just Do It. But I at least wanted to pass on the IP
> number acceleration idea for anyone who wants to juice up their
> most-used bookmarks.
Certainly at the moment a more practical approach.
Although, I think, if repeated (successful) lookups of the same name
are taking too long, it indicates that something is wrong (or at least
not-optimal) with your setup. You could consider running your own
BIND daemon (just for caching) on your machine...
(I assume your repeated lookups are taking to long because you are
accessing a nameserver over a dialup connection. This wouldn't
affect shell users on multiuser systems, because those systes will
presumably have a fast connection to the nearest nameserver.)
Klaus
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Re: LYNX-DEV Optimizing relative URLs, Subir Grewal, 1996/10/23
Re: LYNX-DEV Optimizing relative URLs, Benjamin C. W. Sittler, 1996/10/24