What is PR6?

Seriously. I've been seeing a /PR6/ show up in my 404 reports for a while. Normally, I wouldn't care. If a visitor is looking for something that's not there, has never been there, and isn't planned on ever being there, I don't really care what they see... since what they asked for doesn't exist.

But...

404's are expensive.

By that, I mean that my server assumes that when a visitor asks for something that the thing they asked for exists, and my server goes looking for it. The problem is that /PR6/ doesn't exist, and all the time my server spends looking for it is wasted.

That's expensive: it takes compute cycles away from my CPU, it takes time away from my database server, it consumes bandwidth, and slows down the experience for everyone else. All this ends up incurring actual monetary cost from me.

I've got tools in place to mitigate these cases (if something requested doesn't exist, send that request to the homepage), but since /PR6/ keeps showing up, I decided to create an actual resource to be returned (this page), with a little background as to why. Is that the best solution, no, but it gets the job done and helps share with you a little information about the issue, just in case you're seeing the same thing on your end.

All that having been said, why not head back to Redoubt Solutions.