HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Keeping Copies Fresh

Cached copies might not all be consistent with the documents on the server. After all, documents do change over time. Reports might change monthly. Online newspapers change daily. Financial data may change every few seconds. Caches would be useless if they always served old data. Cached data needs to maintain some consistency with the server data.

HTTP includes simple mechanisms to keep cached data sufficiently consistent with servers, without requiring servers to remember which caches have copies of their documents. HTTP calls these simple mechanisms document expiration and server revalidation .

Document Expiration

HTTP lets an origin server attach an “expiration date” to each document, using special HTTP Cache-Control and Expires headers (Figure 7-13). Like an expiration date on a quart of milk, these headers dictate how long content should be viewed as fresh.

Figure 7-13. Expires and Cache Control headers

Until a cache document expires, the cache can serve the copy as often as it wants, without ever contacting the server—unless, of course, a client request includes headers that prevent serving a cached or unvalidated resource. But, once the cached document expires, the cache must check with the server to ask if the document has changed and, if so, get a fresh copy (with a new expiration date).

Expiration Dates and Ages

Servers specify expiration dates ...