Intel 1520 User Manual

Page of 176
Appendix A Caching Solutions and Performance
117
For example, if a document was last modified 32 days ago and was sent to the 
appliance two days ago, the document is considered fresh in cache for three 
days after it was sent. (This assumes a factor of 10%.) So for this situation, 
the document is considered fresh for one more day.
Because this method could result in lengthy freshness times for documents 
that have not changed for long periods, cache administrators might want to 
place an upper boundary on the freshness limit. With this boundary in place 
the freshness limit becomes the smaller of the two values: the boundary or the 
computed freshness limit. For information on how to configure an upper 
boundary, refer to the Freshness section of the Configure: Cache page of the 
Manager UI. See Freshness‚ on page 36.
Default test:
For documents that do not have 
Expires
 headers or do not have both 
Last-
Modified
 and 
Date
 headers, you can specify an absolute freshness limit in 
the Freshness section of the Configure: Cache page. See Freshness‚ on 
page 36
.
Revalidate rules:
Revalidate rules apply specific freshness limits to specific HTTP or FTP 
objects. From the command-line interface, you can set freshness limits for 
objects originating from particular domains or IP addresses, objects with 
URL addresses that contain specified regular expressions, and objects 
requested by particular clients. See Configuring caching rules‚ on page 79
Deciding whether to serve HTTP objects
Even though a document might be fresh in the cache, clients or servers could 
have constraints that prevent them from retrieving the document from the cache. 
For example, a client might request that a document not come from a cache, or if 
it does, the document cannot have been cached for more than 10 minutes.
The Intel NetStructure Cache Appliance bases the servability of a cached 
document on 
Cache-Control
 header fields. These headers can appear in both 
client requests and server responses.
The following cache-control header fields affect whether objects are served:
✔ The 
no-cache
 field, sent by clients, tells the appliance to serve no objects 
directly from the cache; always revalidate. You can configure the appliance to 
ignore client no-cache fields. See Cache activation‚ on page 35
✔ The 
max-age
 field, sent by servers, is compared to the document age; if the 
age is less than the 
max-age
, the document is fresh and can be served.