Caching the right way

I sometimes notice that there is some kind of confusion about how content is transferred from a CQ system to the enduser, mostly regarding caches, cache invalidation and content expiration.

We must make a difference between 2 separate mechanisms:

1. Caching as in “Communique dispatcher cache”. As already described the dispatcher cache gets only invalidated when a replication agent triggers the invalidation. There isn’t a mechanism which invalidates content after a certain amount of time.
2. Caching as in “make use of the browser cache”. A RFC to the HTTP standard describes several mechanism to specify the timeframe in which objects are valid. Here is a more informal introduction.

So this 2 mechanism doesn’t collide; if you want to distribute your content effectivly you should use both: The dispatcher cache to lower the load on your CQ systems, and the right HTTP headers to move traffic off your systems (and your internet connection) to downstreamd proxies and browser caches.

Some remarks to the right HTTP headers:

• If you don’t have any HTTP headers for caching, most proxies and browsers guess how long they consider an object as “live” or “valid”. Do not rely on these, control it yourself! Add the headers.
• CQ doesn’t add any caching header by itself.
• An very easy way to add HTTP caching headers is to configure your webserver to add them (for Apache: mod_expires is quite easy to use). Then every time your webserver delivers a object through the dispatcher (either by fetching it from CQ or by retrieving from cache) it will add these headers.