Expiration Header Question

[jcneil1]

I have a dilemma... On the one hand, setting the expiration header in IIS to any length of time causes pages to load much faster in visitors browsers.
On the other hand it is causing the logs to shrink drastically and I lose vital statistical info.
Mysteriously, even a 1 hour expiration causes roughly a 50% rediction in log size. I am suspecting some ISP proxy's dont honor the expire time once it is set to anything other than "expire immediately"
Any suggestions for this issue?
Thanks is advance
Neil

 

[ChrisHunt]

Can't comment much without knowing more, but if your site is laid out in such a way that visitors must pass pass repeatedly through particular pages, the home page say, then even a modest amount of caching could have a significant effect on the number of hits you see.

If you really need to see the "true" log stats, try to configure your server to set long cache expiration times on images, media files and other bandwidth-heavy elements on your pages, but short or immediate times on the html files themselves. That way you should get the best of both worlds.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[jcneil1]

I had been thinking of trying that-

Thanks