Patent ID: 7613815

Claim:
A device to log information in a network cache, the device comprising: a processor and a memory together providing, an application module to receive requests from a plurality of clients for content maintained by an origin server and to receive responses to the requests from the origin server; an interface to allow selection of a protocol, including a selection for logging of some or all of a plurality of fields of the protocol that may be present in each of said requests and responses, and a specification of a sequence in which the selected fields are to appear in a log file; a first data structure to store, for all of the plurality of fields of the protocol, an indication of whether a particular field has been selected for logging, wherein when the particular field has been selected for logging, the indication identifies a position in the specified sequence of the particular selected field; a second data structure to store information corresponding to each selected field; a third data structure to store, for each of the selected fields, a reference to the corresponding information stored in the second data structure, wherein each reference is stored in a location of the third data structure that corresponds to the position in the specified sequence of the selected field, and wherein the position is identified by the indication stored in the first data structure that corresponds to the selected field; and a log module to record information of the received requests and responses into the log file, according to the selected protocol, the selected fields of the protocol, and the specified sequence.