Chapter 2. How Web Caching Works
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Chapter 2. How Web Caching Works
What makes an object cachable or uncachable? How does a cache know when a request is a hit or when to revalidate a cached object? This chapter gives you some background on how web caches work. Many of the topics in this chapter are covered definitively in the HTTP/1.1 draft standard document, RFC 2616. The material here tells you what you need to know; for all the gory details, you'll need to consult the actual RFC document.
To start, we'll see what a typical HTTP request looks like and how it's different when talking to a proxy. Next, we'll see how caches decide if they can store a particular response. After that, we'll talk about cache hits, stale objects, and validation techniques. I'll explain how users can force caches to return an up-to-date response. Finally, we'll see what happens when a cache becomes full and must choose to remove some objects.
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