On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: > It occurs to me that I don't believe I've seen any discussion of the > Unexpected Consequence of pervasive HTTPS replacing HTTP for unauthenticated > sessions, like non-logged-in users browsing sites like Wikipedia. > > That traffic's not cacheable, is it? Proxy caches on services like > mobile 3/4G, or smaller ISPs, or larger corporations can't cache it, I > wouldn't think, which means both that they will see traffic increases, > and that the end sites will as well. > > Has this been discussed and I missed it? Do I improperly understand > transparent caching? Or is this just a bomb waiting to go off? > > I assume that Wikipedia themselves are on top of the idea that their > in-house reverse-proxies won't be carrying that traffic (though I don't > actually know what their architecture looks like anymore), but.. >
If anyone's curious about Wikipedia (we're open with our architecture) - we aren't really effected by using https instead of http for non logged in sessions. I'm assuming all of the other major sites use similar methods. The path goes user <--> LVS load balancer <--> nginx ssl termination <--> varnish (caching layer) <--> (if cache miss) application layer The only extra "hop" for https is the ssl termination, and while if all of a sudden 100% of our traffic switched from http to https, we'd be underprovisioned and have to scramble, the incremental effect of a single user (or all the https everywhere users!) using https is incredibly tiny. It's not as cpu-intensive as many people think. Unless a corporation is breaking ssl ( like in this case - http://superuser.com/questions/115349/firefox-this-connection-is-untrusted-behind-corporate-firewall ) their proxies would be unable to cache SSL content. If you're curious about wikimedia's architecture, you can check it out on our wiki -- https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Leslie > Cheers, > -- jra > -- > Jay R. Ashworth Baylink > j...@baylink.com > Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 > Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII > St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274 >