Details
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Task
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Status: Open
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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None
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None
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New
Description
just by the nature of using Apache httpd our website is pretty well behaved in terms of Last-Modified & ETag headers – but diff browsers use different hueristics for how long they will cache a page before they even bother to do a validation request, that can cause many people to see "stale" pages after we do release announcements.
Example: Chrome apparently uses this hueristic – w/o any upper bound – to decide how long to keep an item in it's cache w/o revalidation...
(date_item_was_last_fetched - last_mod_date_when_item_was_last_fetched) / 10
...that means that if it's been 100 days since they last time we updated & published a page, when someone loads our website in chrome, their browser will cache that page for up to 10 days w/o bothering to do a cacle-validation request to see if the page has changed.
We should consider taking advantage of mod_headers in our htaccess file to set Cache-Control: max-age ... headers on various file extensions, and perhaps set lower max-ages (or must-revalidate options) on some of the pages we use specifically for annoucements & releases (ie: news, download, doc landing pages, etc...)