[ILUG] 302 redirection strangeness

[Niall O Broin]

I have a web site on which requests for some files are redirected via  
mod_rewrite  with a 302 from serverA to serverB. I was just doing  
some work on stats for the site and I observed that there's a big  
discrepancy between the number of redirects issued by serverA, and  
the number of subsequent fetches of the file from serverB. In the  
case of three files I looked at in the logs for one day recently, the  
numbers were 23950 / 17614 and 23930 / 16815 and 18636 / 12248 (302  
from serverA / 200 from serverB).

I first thought it might have been people cancelling downloads, as  
two of the files are fairly large flash files. However, the third one  
is about a 7KB image - hardly something which people will  
deliberately cancel a download of.

Can anyone hazard a guess as to what might be going one here? Is  
there some kind of browser setting I never came across before which  
says more or less "If you get a 302 redirect, ignore it". And this  
setting would have to be activated on about 25% of all browsers (or  
all which visit this site anyway).

Both servers run Linux and Apache, which is as on-topic as this gets.


Niall

P.S. The missing GB in my recent question is still missing - let's  
see if you can do better with this conundrum :-)