Implementation Guide › Performance Tuning › Web Tier Performance › Reduce Traffic between Your Web Agents and the Policy Server › Caching and Anonymous Users

Caching and Anonymous Users

The anonymous authentication schemes offered by SiteMinder do not provide access control to resources that they protect. Anonymous authentication schemes allow the following for unidentified users on your network:

• Track how often a user returns to your sites.
• Track what a particular user does while visiting your sites (such as the pages the user viewed during a visit).
• Display personalized content for a particular user.

When users request resources protected by an anonymous authentication scheme, the Policy Server assigns a Global Unique Identifier (GUID), and stores it in the browser of the associated user. SiteMinder uses this GUID to identify the user.

If you plan to use an anonymous authentication scheme, implementing the following items can improve performance in your SiteMinder environment:

• Separate web servers to handle the anonymous requests.
• Configure the Web Agent on each separate web server to cache the anonymous requests by setting the CacheAnonymous parameter.

Using separate web severs and Web Agents for anonymous users keeps the caches on the other web servers that service requests for the protected resources from being flushed too often.

Note: For more information, see the Web Agent Configuration Guide.