Optimizing for $money?

While some sites optimize for speed and bandwidth usage, others do the opposite. About a decade ago when Internet connection at the office (then at pathetic speed of 128-256kbps) was experiencing serious slowdown, I noticed that images and even flag icons from the Summer Olympic website are deliberately made totally uncacheable, by setting Expires header value to a past date. Apparently IBM is still doing the same trick for the Grand Slams sites.

$ cctrl() { perl -MLWP::UserAgent -E'$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new; $res=$ua->get($ARGV[0]); say $res->header("cache-control")' $1; }

RSS icon, only cacheable for several hours:

$ cctrl http://www.rolandgarros.com/images/nav/rgr_nv_00000g3.gif
max-age=15000

In fact all content photos are also cacheable for several hours only, despite already having unique URLs.

Yellow button, which surely won't change a lot (and has a fairly unique URL anyway), cacheable only to a little over 11 minutes!

$ cctrl http://www.rolandgarros.com/images/misc/rgr_ms_00000g2.gif
max-age=700

Compare to:

$ cctrl http://www.facebook.com/images/app_icons/newsfeed.gif
max-age=2592000

or even:

$ cctrl http://www.ibm.com/i/v16/t/ibm-logo.gif
max-age=2592000