Re: Ten ways to speed up the download time of your website

On 02:04:41 17 July 2004 Dan Zambonini wrote:

I’m afraid my original message (and indeed Trenton’s) was correct (I wasn’t imagining things!) - the server does respond with a re-direct response (302), as mentioned (amongst other places) at http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/load_no11.htm

I stand corrected yet again! 8-O

I was sad enough to get network traffic analyser and check (before I had breakfast!) what exactly is happening with IE6 and webserver. And shockingly to me webserver indeed DOES respond with code "301 moved permanently" and then giving location to the same URL but with / at the end. This does NOT happen if / was there in the first place, so it appears to be true that there are some material savings in this sort of situations. It also appears to be the case in situations where an index file is present (ie the contents of that file are shown, not the listing of directory), since this scenario is more common then linking to list of all files in directory I was certainly wrong to suggest that adding / at the end of directories should not matter. Sadly for me I was totally wrong on this one! 8-O

What is beyond me is why webserver forces browser to redirect instead of doing it automatically thus saving all that waiting time (which depends on latency, so 56k users will feel it more than broadband ones)!?!?!?!