Software Architect's Handbook

Leveraging HTTP caching

Many roundtrips between a client and a server may be necessary to load a page, and retrieving resources for that page from the server can take up significant amounts of time. The ability to cache resources that might be needed again so that they do not need to be transferred over the network on subsequent trips is an important part of improving web application performance.

Browsers are capable of caching data so that it doesn't need to be fetched from a server again. Resources such as CSS or JavaScript files might be shared across multiple pages of your web application. As a user navigates to various pages, they will need these resources multiple times. In addition, users may return to your web application at some ...