Caching HTTP Headers, Last-Modified and ETag

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What if we cannot predict lifetime of page content? If we have a page with info that changes unpredictably we still can use browser cache to avoid unneeded traffic.
Using validation mechanism browser sends HTTP request with info about cache entry and server can respond that the content wasn’t changed.
There are two validation methods: one is based on Last-Modified and the other is based on Etag.

Last-Modified
Server sends Last-Modified header with datetime value that means the time when content was changed last time.
Cache-Control: must-revalidate
Last-Modified: 15 Sep 2008 17:43:00 GMT

The first header Cache-Control: must-revalidate means that browser must send validation request every time even if there is already cache entry exists for this object.
Browser receives the content and stores it in the cache along with the last modified value.
Next time browser will send additional header:
If-Modified-Since: 15 Sep 2008 17:43:00 GMT

This header means that browser has cache entry that was last changed 17:43.
Then server will compare the time with last modified time of actual content and if it was changed server will send the whole updated object along with new Last-Modified value.

If there were no changes since the previous request then there will be short empty-body answer:
HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified

And browser will use the cached content.

What if server doesn’t send Cache-Control: must-revalidate?
Then modern browsers look at profile setting or decide on their own whether to send conditional request. So we better to send Cache-Control to make sure that browser sends conditional request.

Sample PHP code:

$last_modified_ts = floor(mktime()/30)*30;
if (
isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) &&
strtotime($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) >= $last_modified_ts
)
{
header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified');
exit;
}
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('d M Y H:i:s',$last_modified_ts).' GMT');
echo date('d M Y H:i:s');

This example outputs cached datetime that’s expiring every 30 seconds.

Last-Modified suits good in case we can easily calculate modification time of page content.

We must be careful with Last-Modified if we have page content that consists many fragments. We should calculate Last-Modified value of every fragment and get the latest one.
Note that if we have authentication and there is a page fragment that depends on authentication we have to reset Last-Modified value after login/logout – for every page that contains the fragment.
Also note that in case of several web servers we should make sure that Last-Modified value changes synchronous for all the servers.

ETag
This method suits for cases when it’s difficult to maintain Last-Modified value: when you have complicated application with many page fragments especially if there are third-party libraries. Or for the case with authentication, when page content depends on authentication info.
There is simple idea besides ETag:
ETag value depends on the content and must be different for different content and the same for the same content.

Sample usage of ETag header:
$content = floor(mktime()/30)*30;
$etag = md5($content);
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'] == $etag)
{
header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified');
exit;
}
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
header('ETag: '.$etag);
echo $content;
echo '
Request time: '.date('d M Y H:i:s');

In this example content changes every 30 seconds and browsers will download only if the content was changed.

Static Content and Unnecessary ETag Header
For static content it’s recommended to send Cache-Control: max-age=… header with higher max-age value. In this case browser won’t send any request on normal page views.
So for static content there is no use of ETag header.
The worse case is in case of web servers cluster as ETag value differs for the file on different servers.
For Lighttpd server you can disable Etag using
static-file.etags = 'disable'
in lighttpd.conf

Disabling ETag in Apache:
Header unset ETag
FileETag None

Note that we still want Last-Modified header for static files. If user presses Refresh button, then browser will send conditional request and server will respond “304 Not Modified”.
And if you disable both Last-Modified and ETag browser will have to download the whole content again when user presses Refresh.

Lighttpd and Apache will send Last-Modified if you have configured mod_expires.

34 thoughts on “Caching HTTP Headers, Last-Modified and ETag”

  1. i have last-modified and max-age directive for static files, yet with firefox, it still will request files even if they are cached.

    best.

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  6. Hi,

    I’m using HTTP Watch. Now, when i open a particular page. I see few components (say 42 occurences) as 304 not-modified and few components as Cached. I simply cannot understand the difference b/w the two as both are coming from caches. Everytime i load the page the occurences for 304-not modified keeps changing (say 15 occurences the 2nd time). I’m really getting confused.
    My question is
    1) on what all settings will i get 304 not modified. (FYI : currently what i see is Cache-control = private ;; also ETAG is set)
    2) on what all settings the page will be retreived just from cache without any validation i.e i dont want 304 not modified but still from cache (FYI :the components which are Cached in my capture, have ETAG set)
    3) Why the no. of occurences keep changing on next page load???

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