Strange Behaviour of cache....

I'm relataively new to Squid but have been delving around in the config and
with the debug levels and am not sure how to interpret the following from
the logfile:

853395764.468 11861 130.102.32.104 TCP_REFRESH_HIT/304 103 GET
http://www.habs.com/scores/9697/schedule.htm -
FIRST_PARENT_MISS/http-proxy.uq.edu.au -

        The object http://www.habs.com/scores/9697/schedule.htm was stale,
so an If-Modified-Since was sent. The 304 code means that it has not been
modified since. The TCP_REFRESH_HIT means that although it was stale it
was in the local cache...so my big question is....why did my cache request
the object from my parent who actually returned a MISS? Am I correct in
interpreting this as meaning that while I got a REFRESH_HIT and a 304 Not
Modified that my cache STILL retrieved the object from my parent who retrieved
it from the original site?? I originally thought, "no, that can't be right,
if I get a HIT and a 304 then I will deliver immediately from MY cache" but
the delivery time of 11861 points more to my cache waiting on my parent to
retrieve a copy and then pass it along to me.

        Background:

        SunOS 4.1.4, Squid 1.1.5, default refresh rule for.
Cache size is 80Mb

        Another quick query, how can I adjust the LRU time? When I was
playing with debug levels I saw that LRU was being applied with a 2.94 day
time limit. Ideally I'd like to tweak the parameters so that when someone
downloads the latest netscape.exe or whatever that it stays in the cache
for at least a week before being purged.

Thanks for any help or pointers you can offer,

Robert
Received on Fri Jan 24 1997 - 21:41:51 MST