Best Practices for HTTP Servers
How can web servers be optimised to perform faster? Can resources be cached, compressed, etc.
There are a number of HTTP headers that one needs to understand in order to deal with performance optimisations.
In practice, Last-Modified and Etag are similar validators and can be grouped together. Expires and cache-control can similarly be grouped together.
Expires and cache-control would indicate to the browser that a cached resource is still valid and therefore, does not need to be fetched.
Last-Modified and Etag however, will require the browser to attempt to validate with the server every-time. If the origin server ascertains that the resource has not changed, status 304 is returned (indicating that the cache is still valid). The actual resource would be returned otherwise.
It is a good practice to use both groups where appropriate:
Apache allows the Etag value to be computed using only last modified date and size without the inode value.
IIS 6 allows administrators to set the Etag_change_number – e.g. to 0 – to synchronise the servers in a web farm (incidentally, IIS 7 already has 0 as the immutable default value).
More information regarding Cache-control can be found here
There are a number of HTTP headers that one needs to understand in order to deal with performance optimisations.
- Last-Modified – Origin server indicates when the resource was believed to have been last modified. Given by both date and time.
- Etag – Entity tag or unique ID for each version of a resource which is usually comprised of the file-location, file-size and last modified date
- Expires – Origin server indicates to the browser when the resource becomes stale or how long to keep in cache. Applicable to HTTP/1.0; apparently deprecated in HTTP/1.1
- Cache-control – Origin server indicates to the browser and intermediaries whether or not to cache the resource and if to cache, for how long (cache-control:max-age). Applicable to HTTP/1.1
In practice, Last-Modified and Etag are similar validators and can be grouped together. Expires and cache-control can similarly be grouped together.
Expires and cache-control would indicate to the browser that a cached resource is still valid and therefore, does not need to be fetched.
Last-Modified and Etag however, will require the browser to attempt to validate with the server every-time. If the origin server ascertains that the resource has not changed, status 304 is returned (indicating that the cache is still valid). The actual resource would be returned otherwise.
It is a good practice to use both groups where appropriate:
- For content that seldom changes (e.g. CSS, images) – use Expires and Cache-control
- For others (e.g. javascript files, HTML, dynamic pages) – use Last-Modified and Etag
Apache allows the Etag value to be computed using only last modified date and size without the inode value.
IIS 6 allows administrators to set the Etag_change_number – e.g. to 0 – to synchronise the servers in a web farm (incidentally, IIS 7 already has 0 as the immutable default value).
More information regarding Cache-control can be found here
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