High Performance Web Sites

Max-Age and mod_expires

Before I explain how better caching improves performance, it's important to mention an alternative to the Expires header. The Cache-Control header was introduced in HTTP/1.1 to overcome limitations with the Expires header. Because the Expires header uses a specific date, it has stricter clock synchronization requirements between server and client. Also, the expiration dates have to be constantly checked, and when that future date finally arrives, a new date must be provided in the server's configuration.

Alternatively, Cache-Control uses the max-age directive to specify how long a component is cached. It defines the freshness window in seconds. If less than max-age seconds have passed since the component was requested, the browser will use the cached version, thus avoiding an additional HTTP request. A far future max-age header might set the freshness window 10 years in the future.

Cache-Control: max-age=315360000

Using Cache-Control with max-age overcomes the limitations of Expires, but you still might want an Expires header for browsers that don't support HTTP/1.1 (even though this is probably less than 1% of your traffic). You could specify both response headers, Expires and Cache-Control max-age. If both are present, the HTTP specification dictates that the max-age directive will override the Expires header. However, if you're conscientious, you'll still worry about the clock synchronization and configuration maintenance issues with Expires.

Fortunately, ...