July 09, 2004

Does HTTP caching still matter?

Back when I first got involved in the Web, caching of HTTP responses was a big deal. Indeed, a lot of the features in HTTP 1.1 are concerned with various kinds of cache interaction (specifying lifetimes, busting caches, dealing with noncompliant or old-style caches). Even now, a very common objection to hear to any change to HTTP is that it won't interact well with caches. Lately I became curious: are caches still important? I'm not talking about content distribution networks like Akamai but conventional caches that aren't operated by the server. Does anybody know what fraction of HTTP traffic goes through caches these days?

For discussion: how would you estimate the answer to the above question? Posted by ekr at July 9, 2004 08:05 AM | TrackBack

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