Multiple requests for same page

I have created a page about a sortof "hobby" subject of mine, which has many outbound links to 3rd websites. So quite often, the visitor clicks a link, comes back, then clicks next link, comes back etc. My page runs the "risk" of getting too popular, so I'm trying to find ways to save traffic.

In the past I've noticed that some visitors reloaded the page again and again 30-50-100 times, without 304s, as if they click back-and-forth with their browser cache off or they kept hitting Ctrl-F5 (I'm using proper Last-Modified and Expires headers, but Apache provides no Content-Length header, as I'm using SSI)

Recently, I've even started using base target _blank in <header> for the whole document, so that ALL links should open in new windows (my page is just one self-contained document).

Yet, I'm still experiencing visitors who load that HTML page 30-50-100 times. Do these people's software really not cache AND not use last-modified and expires AND also don't honor the _blank directive

E.g. this visitor loaded my page 60 times:

xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:47:12 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:47:17 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:47:40 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:48:05 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:48:20 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:48:32 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:48:39 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
[snip]
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:53:07 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:54:21 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:54:36 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:54:51 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:55:04 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xx.yy.112.193 - - [01/Apr/2007:17:55:11 +0300] "GET /widget.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57830 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
[snip]

Any ideas what might be happening here?

Multiple requests for same page

Despite _blank open in new window

dhatz

dhatz

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