[Cerowrt-devel] cerowrt 3.3.8-17 is released

[Kenneth Finnegan]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> and disabling or dropping the underused polipo proxy -
>

I think the proxy being under-used could be fixed if we had CeroWRT
optionally advertise wpad when you start Polipo. When enabled, we
would just need the router to resolve wpad.local.domain the same as
gw.local.domain, and serve a gw.local.domain:80/wpad.dat file
containing something like:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host){
	if (isInNet(host, "172.30.42.0", "255.255.255.0")) {
		return "DIRECT";
	}	
	return "PROXY gw.local.domain:3128; DIRECT";
}

WPAD is really how the proxy-on-a-LAN experience should be.  The HUGE
issue with WPAD is that browsers (at least Firefox) switch to
resolving all DNS queries synchronously instead of async when they
detect a wpad configured network.  Any gains from caching what little
web content is (advertised) as cacheable are lost many times over when
every DNS request causes the Firefox UI to FREEZE.  Hit a page with
several different domains on it (and what websites don't make you
resolve analytics.google.com, twitter.com, plus.google.com, digg.com,
reddit.com, etc etc) and the entire Firefox GUI locks up for several
seconds.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769764

Just some food for thought. I would agree that in the face of memory
pressure, it should be one of the first things to go; the vast
majority of web servers aren't even configured correctly to mark
cacheable content, so caching is usually force by writing
pattern-matching rules which over-ride the (non-existent) caching
meta-data.

Kenneth Finnegan
blog.thelifeofkenneth.com