[RFC] remove negative_ttl directive ?

[Amos Jeffries]

The negative_ttl directive is continuously causing problems. What it 
does is DoS all clients of a proxy when one of them has a URL problem. 
In modern websites which can present per-client error responses targeted 
at an individual client this can be a major problem.

I propose dropping the directive entirely and following HTTP RFC 
guidelines about cacheability of 4xx-5xx responses.

The one case I can think of it actually being useful is to prevent DDoS 
against a reverse-proxy. However, due to DDoS usually varying the URL 
anyway this is an extremely weak protection.

Can anyone present any actually useful reason to keep it despite the 
problems it presents?


Amos