proxy caching

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 08:49:43AM -0400, bluescreen303 wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I would like to use nginx to cache some responses from my backends.
> There are basically 2 types of responses I would like to cache.
> 
> - public images that never expire
> - private content
> 
> The first one was easy, got that working already. Since my application
> uses timestamps in the html when referring to images, changes to them
> will be instantly picked up.
> 
> The second one is way harder.
> Responses can become quite large (1 upto 10Mb).
> My backend application is putting etags on the responses so it can
> return 304s if nothing changed.
> Also, it puts a 5min max-age cache-control on it,
> Lastly, responses are marked private, because they are behind http basic
> authentication (handled by the backend app).
> 
> What I would like nginx to do is the following:
> It should store the first response for a certain url, using the current
> http auth in the key (so it won't accidentally become publicly
> available).
> If a second request comes in for the same url with the same http auth
> within 5 minutes: serve from cache.
> If a second request comes in for the same url with the same http auth
> _after_ 5 mintutes: ask backend using the if-not-modified header.
> - if modified, store the new response.
> - if 304 not modified, respond from cache, update cache to be valid for
> 5 minutes again.
> If a request comes in for the same url but with other http auth: ignore
> cache and ask backend.
> 
> The http auth stuff seems solvable by using the http auth in the
> cache_key.
> The other 2 things I would like to solve are:
> 
> - I can't find clear info about nginx's handling of etag and
> if-not-modified. Will it work as described above out-of-the-box?
> It's especially important that nginx uses if-not-modified when querying
> the backend, even if the client request itself didn't contain it.
> Ofcourse if the client request did include it, it should receive a nice
> 304 too.

Right now nginx can't use conditional requests to refresh cache.

> - The backend sends Cache-Control: private for these responses. I would
> like nginx to cache them though.
> Ignoring the Cache-Control header doesn't seem to work (because without
> cache-control at all, caching seems disabled)
> Another option might be to have the backend set cache-control to public
> and have nginx set it back to private, but that sounds a bit hacky.

Solution is to ignore Cache-Control header and enable caching 
explicitly with proxy_cache_valid directive.

Maxim Dounin