How long do you think is best to force a Static HTML page from your webserver to be cached by ISPs proxy server out there? If you do not set anything in your apache, your page will be cache longer maybe 1 months as ISP willing . If a customer upload HTML page to your machine but got stuck to his ISP proxy cache then he can't see the new page and IE5.x is buggy that It did not pass proxy , your customers will be yelling at you , the capaility comparison between you and other hosts occur ,you have to answer more question by phone and email what happen to their sites. But if you force no HTML cache at all, you'll lost more bandwidth and if you use mod_gzip , you will lost more machine power.

Any proxy server that caches pages in one month without consulting the original server is broken :(. Maybe putting a reasonable expiration date will solve the problem, 6 hours to one day should be good. Then you can tell your customers to wait at most 6 hours or one day. Well, except if the proxy server is also broken in the case. :)

The best solution is not to use static HTML pages :D

But it depends on site to site and audience. If the site has to change a lot, and the audience comes from behind the proxy, it's best to send HTTP expire and no-cache tags.

Most of the proxies won't cache it.

Originally posted by masood
The best solution is not to use static HTML pages :D

But it depends on site to site and audience. If the site has to change a lot, and the audience comes from behind the proxy, it's best to send HTTP expire and no-cache tags.

Most of the proxies won't cache it.

If the proxy server is so broken that it caches things for a month, then it probably won't honor your headers either. :(

Originally posted by priyadi


If the proxy server is so broken that it caches things for a month, then it probably won't honor your headers either. :(

Usually the proxies are not broken by default :stickout I know from my own experience where we used to "break it ourself" so that it can cache pages for 30 days :D

However it needs an extra effort to cache the dynamic pages and by-pass HTTP standards. By default the proxies are required to honour HTTP headers.

You are right. :) If the proxy is broken, it will cache no matter what you do :bawling:

A nice trick for this is to ask your client to check the page by adding something at the end of URL, e.g.

http://www.yoursite.com/mypage.html?haha=1 :)

or

http://www.yoursite.com/mypage.html?123

;)