Errors in timestamp-based HTTP header values
Jeffrey C. Mogul · 2007
Many of the caching mechanism in HTTP, especially in HTTP/1.0, depend on header fields that carry absolute timestamp values. Errors in these values could lead to undetected cache incoherence, or to excessive cache misses. Using an extensive proxy trace, we looked for HTTP responses exhibiting several different categories of timestamp-related errors. A significant fraction of these responses have detectable errors in timestamp-based header fields.