Thanks Brandon, that works for me.  The cookie has been great btw, we're
learning great stuff.

On Wednesday, April 29, 2015, Brandon Black <[email protected]> wrote:

> Re: the header name:
>
> Keep in mind this header does get sent back to clients as a response
> header as well.  It's probably not a great practice to be using a
> generic-sounding header name like "Last" there and waiting to find out
> what it conflicts with now or in the future (although I'll note that
> the only thing even close in current common use is "Last-Modified").
> The norm would be at least X-Something for a custom weird header, but
> I feel the WMF-Something prefix is pretty valid in this context as
> well.
>
> We could blend up the best of all of these concerns if we don't care
> about human readability much and just make it something like
> "X-WMFLA", too.  Regardless, to be honest our pages are so inefficient
> and huge on average that I'm not overly concerned about the size of
> this one header's name to begin with.  There's a ton of lower-hanging
> fruit than that to go after for reducing response sizes...
>
> Re: date formats:
>
> The stringification VCL offers of the current timestamp "now" was
> chosen to match the format used in Expires fields of Cookie headers,
> which is rfc822/rfc1123 -based (with 4 digit years and fixed GMT
> timezone for best compat with various cookie "standards"), so we get
> something like "Wed, 01 Jan 2000 01:01:01 GMT".  The form we're using
> for Last-Access is just the easiest transformation we could do on that
> while throwing out the redundancy and excess precision and making it
> compatible with cookie data-value formatting.
>
> In defense of minimizing our processing complexity here: In general
> it's important that we minimize not only the runtime perf hit of our
> frontline VCL (as *every* single HTTP request to us runs through this
> code, including DDoS attacks and celebrity death traffic inrushes and
> such), but also the complexity of the VCL codebase (as it's both
> operations-critical and horribly difficult to work on), so we tend to
> prefer to offload any post-processing that's not strictly necessary to
> elsewhere down the stats pipeline.
>
> -- Brandon
>
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