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I have a web application that contains a few hundred small images, and is performing quite badly on load.

To combat this, I would like to cache static files in the browser.

Using a servlet filter on Tomcat 7, I now set the expires header correctly on static files, and can see that this is returned to Chrome:

Accept-Ranges:bytes
Cache-Control:max-age=3600
Content-Length:40284
Content-Type:text/css
Date:Sat, 14 Apr 2012 09:37:04 GMT
ETag:W/"40284-1333964814000"
**Expires:Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:37:05 GMT**
Last-Modified:Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:46:54 GMT
Server:Apache-Coyote/1.1

However, I notice that Chrome is still doing a round trip to the server for each static resource on reloads, sending an if-modified header and getting a correct 304 Not Modified response from Tomcat.

Is there any way to make Chrome avoid these 100+ requests to the server until the expiry has genuinely passed?

BartoszKP
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Benjamin Wootton
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  • Are these images constantly changing or do most of them stay the same? – abraham Apr 15 '12 at 00:06
  • A similar question has been asked: [Chrome - why is it sending if-modified-since requests?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3934413/chrome-why-is-it-sending-if-modified-since-requests). Not sure it was actually answered but there's a few idea there ... – kevinjansz Apr 15 '12 at 23:07

3 Answers3

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There are 3 ways of loading a page -

  1. Putting the url in the address bar and pressing enter which is equivalent to navigating from a hyper link (Default browsing behaviour). This will honour the Expires headers and will first check the cache of the static content to be valid and then if the Expires header time is in future it will load it directly from the cache. In this case the browser will make no request at all to the server. In case the cached content is in-valid it will make a request to the server.

  2. Pressing f5 to refresh the page. This would basically send a if-modified header to the server and verify if the content has changed. If it has changed you would get a 200 response else if not then a 304 response. In both cases the image is not loaded on the page until a response is received from the server.

  3. Pressing ctrl+f5 which would forcefully clear all the cache and reload all the images. It will not spend time in verifying if the images have changed or not using the headers.

I guess the behaviour you are expecting is the first kind. The only thing that you should be looking at is the way you are loading the page. Normally people are not going to press f5 or ctrl+f5 thus your static content will not be re-validated every time. It will forcefully clear the cache and reload every static item on the page.

In short just remember - reload the page by pressing enter in the address bar instead. The browser will honour the headers that you have provided. This is not specific to chrome, its a W3C standard.

tusharmath
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Be carefull when you are testing. I noticed that in Chrome version 20 if I hit F5 to reload the page then in the network panel I see new requests. Hoewer if I place the cursor to the title bar, after the current page url, and hit enter, I get resources from cache, whitch header was set to cache.

Also a good reading:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-http-caching/

Kristóf Dombi
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Assuming you have ruled out the various gotchas that have already been suggested, I found that Google Chrome can ignore the Cache-Control directive unless it includes public, and that it has to be first. For example:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600

In my experiments I also removed ETags from the server response, so that could be a factor, but I didn't go back and check.

Rupert Rawnsley
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