I have been invited to speak about HTTP caching and cache-busting at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in July 2004.
Abstract of my talk:
A user’s web experience can often be improved by the proper use of HTTP caches. This talk discusses when to use and when to avoid caching, how to employ cache-busting techniques most effectively, and how to diagnose problems with caches.
In particular, this talk will cover:
- Overview of HTTP caches
- Shared caches vs. private caches
- Proxy caches and HTTP server accelerators
- How to encourage caching for static content
- Reduction of network bandwidth usage
- Improved browsing and page-rendering speed by avoiding network round-trips
- How to discourage caching for personalized or frequently-changing content
- How to disable caching for sensitive content
- Cache-busting for accurate hit-metering and advertising statistics
- Cache-busting for sensitive information (e.g. personal financial data)
- “Expires” vs. “Cache-Control” and other HTTP headers
- The best of all worlds: unique URL tagging techniques that defeat proxy caches but work gracefully with browser caches
- Sending HTTP headers
- Apache’s mod_headers and mod_expires modules
- PHP’s header() and mod_perl’s $r->header_out() functions
- Using HTML <meta> tags
- Debugging HTTP caching problems
- Using the Web Developer and Live HTTP Headers extensions for Mozilla
- Diagnosing MSIE with Ethereal
- Text-based debugging
- Rolling your own HTTP proxy
Hope to see you there.