incrediBILL - 2:25 am on Jan 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

Prefetching is the kind of genius PhD thinking that can bring a public Wifi system down to it's knees. Got a couple of hundred people sitting in an airport terminal all prefetching away and you'll switch to 3G so fast it'll make your head spin. Then you notice the 3G speed degrading as everyone else in the room has the same bright idea.

Been blocking prefetch for years and not only do I block it, I put instructions on the page to prefetchers on how to disable it if possible because the masses don't even realize it's happening.

I have a perfectly good reason for blocking prefetch, very large dynamic site. A single surfer requesting multiple dynamic pages isn't a problem. But 20-30 concurrent surfers requesting a bunch of pages at once puts a load on the server. Normally 20-30 surfers prefetching wouldn't be so bad except the spiders are crawling the site non-stop as wll. Not only that, prefetch totally screws my ads, it screws with ad stats, it' screws with page view stats, it's chewing up my available bandwidth for the month, bad idea, stupid idea, a totally ill-conceived Google idea, the kind they see to do best these days ;)

It's right up there with no referers from search queries...

[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:29 am (utc) on Jan 10, 2012]