Joshua Slive wrote:
What needs to be validated is if, in fact, the headers with NEVER be used. Is there any configuration directive or client request that could make mod_cache use headers from the cache when max-age=0? I don't think so.
The headers will be used by the next request - not just this one, and you have to be very careful if assuming anything about what the next request may or may not do.
What may make this workable is the combination of "The body is NOT stale" with "max-age=0". The danger of not writing the headers is that an entity, once stale, will not be freshened when the spec says it should, and will cause a thundering herd of conditional requests to a backend server. This issue has been badly understood by some in the past, who suggested that the ability to update cached entities be removed. We need to make very sure that by fixing one problem we don't introduce another.
That said there is a real issue of a frontend thundering herd problem caused by braindead clients, which inspired the patch in the first place. If this patch was made conditional with a directive, and not made default, then I think it could work.
I'm not sure - is there a directive that does "work around broken clients"? It may be worth adding one.
Nah, I bet there are many times where the two sets of headers will differ (based on Date alone, for example, or Expires, which will get updated to match the max-age=0)
True. Regards, Graham --
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