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Proxying

Solderpunk solderpunk at posteo.net

Mon Aug 10 21:12:09 BST 2020

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On Sun Aug 9, 2020 at 7:55 PM CEST, Jason McBrayer wrote:

colecmac at protonmail.com writes:

I have to wonder whether anyone would actually use this. What do you

all think of this workflow/feature? Is it potentially useful?

I do think a caching proxy would be potentially useful, especially as

few clients do caching themselves. I could also see it useful for

offline use (client spiders through local proxy while online, client

reads

offline through local proxy).

The tricky bit is, of course, cache expiration. We don't provide as much

useful information to the cache as http does. You'll need to use

heuristics not only for how long to cache, but to provide a way to force

a refresh, which isn't covered in the spec.

If nothing else, I think there's a small, useful role for a very simplecaching proxy which just maintains an in-memory cache of everythingvisited which is valid for, say, five minutes. The reason this isuseful is that navigating Gemini capsules often involves extensive useof the "back button" (and, at least for me on AV-98, the "up" command,which gets you from example.com/foo/bar/baz to to example.com/foo/bar/even in the lack of an explicit link, and the "root" command, which getsyou from example.com/foo/bar/baz to to example.com), which often entailsloading the same page repeatedly in a relatively short window of time.A very simple dumb local cache would cut down on transactions for this.

For people like me who often read something in Gemini/Gopherspace, thenwant to reference a few days later but cannot remember where they readit, a proxy which maintained full-text search of everything visited inthe past month or so would be *super* handy, but I have no idea how tobuild such a thing.

I'm kind of attracted to the idea of small, simple, do-one-thing-wellproxies which can be chained together like "filter" programs in apipeline...but I guess the TLS overhead would stack up quickly,encouraging a kind of highly configurable "Swiss army knife" proxyinstead. Not as pretty, but potentially very useful...

Cheers,Solderpunk