I make a GET request to www.mysite.com and in the header I receive:
Cache-Control no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Expires Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma no-cache
Otherwise, I receive notification that some visitors do not see my site but an error occured last week and now fixed.
Seems the error has been cached in their browsers and it is not doing a new request.
Can this be possible?
I believe browsers (including IE) won't cache whole pages, and that DOM is reloaded after every request. This data is contained in the request after all.
Therefore, your visitors may still experience errors. Does your fix depends on resources like JS or CSS? In this case you may have caching issues.
Related
I’m using a custom framework for bundling stylesheets and scripts. (I.e., these are dynamically generated responses, not static files.)
The response for the initial request, when the response is being generated for the very first time, includes these headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public, no-transform, max-age=31536000
Content-Type: text/css; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 18:15:50 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 16:19:36 GMT
Content-Length: 3126
Now that the response above has been generated and cached by the server, subsequent requests for the same stylesheet are responded to with these headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public, no-transform, max-age=31536000
Content-Type: text/css; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 18:15:50 GMT
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 16:20:00 GMT
Content-Length: 3126
Ignoring the new Date value, the headers are identical with the obvious exception of the missing Vary header.
One nasty consequence that I’ve seen in the wild is that if the very first response generated for a given asset is not compressed (due to the corresponding client not supporting compression), then the server caches that non-compressed response and serves it for all subsequent requests to all clients.
Any idea how to have the server retain the Vary header for cached responses?
I’m using HttpCacheability.Public for these responses. I can avoid the issue by using HttpCacheability.Private instead, but I’d prefer to allow the server and proxies to cache responses.
Some reading has led me to believe that IIS can’t do “kernel caching” if you vary by encoding. But I’m not sure if that means I can’t cache on the server at all or if it just prevents a special kind of server-side caching.
Update:
I was originally using the following to set the Vary header:
response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Accept-Encoding");
I tried a different method of specifying it:
response.Cache.SetVaryByCustom("Accept-Encoding");
That caused Vary to never be emitted. Not even on the very first response.
As a last resort, I’m also considering using:
response.Cache.SetNoServerCaching();
That causes the Cache-Control header to still specify public (so that proxies can still cache), but prevents the server from caching.
In line with the update I made to the question, I tried yet another way of specifying the Vary header:
response.Cache.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Encoding"] = true;
…And it fixed the problem. Responses now retain the Vary header across requests from multiple clients and are also cached by the server.
My server returns the following headers for a file:
Accept-Ranges:bytes
Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:155
Content-Type:text/css
Date:Thu, 06 Feb 2014 18:32:44 GMT
ETag:"99000000061b06-9b-4f1c118fdd2f1"
Keep-Alive:timeout=5, max=100
Last-Modified:Thu, 06 Feb 2014 18:32:37 GMT
As you can see, it doesn't return cache-control header, however it returns ETag and Last-Modified headers.
My question is whether browser is going to cache the requested file? I can observr that during the following requests the browser sends ETag:"99000000061b06-9b-4f1c118fdd2f1" in headers and server returns status code 304.
And second question: Will browser cache resource and request it with ETag if Cache-control is set to no-cache?
For first part of question - It is up to your browser (its implementation and configuration) if the response will be cached and when will be revalidated. The only (standardized) difference between browser behaviour with validation headers and behaviour without validation headers is that former one can reduce traffic with server using validation.
Second question: Yes. Browser will cache resource but every time you open the page browser will ask origin server if resource was not modified. If not modified server will respond 304 and browser will display cached content. Otherwise server will send new content.
My guess would be ETag can serve as cache-control: no-cache.
I pushed some changes to one of our images to web server, but I found it's not updated on IE and firefox web browsers due to browser caching, since I saw the browsers didn't even request for image from server.
I have two choice. One is to update the image file name and re-deploy. The other is to let our users' browsers think the image exipires.
I haven't set anything in header or in code, here is the response:
Content-Length 32042
Content-Type image/png
Last-Modified Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:41:50 GMT
Accept-Ranges bytes
Server Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By ASP.NET
Date Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:26:03 GMT
Connection keep-alive
So I am wondering how soon it can expire?
Ideally, if your last-modified time stamp changes, everything should take of by itself. You can set up cache-control http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rahulso/archive/2006/02/02/suppress-caching-of-certain-mime-types-like-gif-jpg-etc.aspx to avoid it.
The following is a http response header from a image on our company's website.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/png
Last-Modified: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:51:57 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "1e61e38a3074ca1:0"
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:06:23 GMT
Content-Length: 9140
Is there anyway to know if this image is publicly cacheable in some proxy server? The RFC definition seems to be ambiguous http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.1 and http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.4.
Run RED on your URL and it'll tell you whether the response is cacheable, among other information.
The headers you show appear to be cacheable.
If you would like to control the caching behavior of correctly configured proxies and web browsers, you might investigate using the Cache-Control and Expires headers to gain additional control.
Here is a webpage I had bookmarked that has one person's opinion of how to intepret the specifications you list (plus some other ones):
http://www.web-caching.com/mnot_tutorial/how.html
If you need to guarantee that someone sees a completely new image each time (even with misconfigured devices between you and them), you may want to consider using a randomized or GUID value as part of the URL.
Here is a tutorial on setting headers for proxy caching. Be sure to read the part about setting cookies!
I'm using valid expires and no-cache headers for my static files and they stay cached for as long as I keep browsing, but when I close my browser and use it back after a while I see the static files loading again, even when not refreshing with ctrl (+ shift) + r
I'm using Firefox, cache size set to 250MB and I don't let it remove any private or cached data.
Headers:
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=29030400, public
Content-Length: 142061
Content-Type: image/png
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:18:43 GMT
Expires: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 19:18:43 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:33:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (EL)
Which version of Firefox? Is the server sending Etags for the static files? You can view details about Firefox cache by going to the address about:cache and poking around. That will give you an idea of what Firefox is caching.
Update: After looking at your header tags, it seems as if the max-age value is set to a date that is way in the past and that is overriding the the value being set in the Expires header. See the HTTP 1.1 protocol definition at: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.3.
If a response includes both an Expires
header and a max-age directive, the
max-age directive overrides the
Expires header, even if the Expires
header is more restrictive. This rule
allows an origin server to provide,
for a given response, a longer
expiration time to an HTTP/1.1 (or
later) cache than to an HTTP/1.0
cache. This might be useful if certain
HTTP/1.0 caches improperly calculate
ages or expiration times, perhaps due
to desynchronized clocks.
You will have to modify your Cache-Control header being sent by the server.