On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 15:44 -0500, Mark Stosberg wrote: > I'm researching how to best integrate caching with a mod_perl website. > For some important cases I want to do some customized stat tracking for > particular queries, although they otherwise return the same content, > which would otherwise be directly cacheable.
The common approach these days is a web bug, using an IMG tag or JavaScript, e.g. Google Analytics. You let the page get cached, but force that part to hit your server each time. I don't see any reason why your idea with If-Modified-Since wouldn't work, except that you really have no control over what clients will do and some of them (e.g. proxy servers) may just cache your stuff and not ask for a while if they get a Last-Modified header. I also recommend you take a look at Michael Radwin's slides on how Yahoo deals with some of this: http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/2004/07/http_caching_and_cachebust.html - Perrin
