Forum: NGINX Order of HTTP headers change cache behaviour

Hello.

Looking at my log I've noticed that some pages were not cached. After a 
bit of debugging I've noticed that the order in which the HTTP header 
are returned from Apache change how NGINX this save the page in the 
cache

So a page with this code is *NOT* cached

<?php

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
header('Last-Modified: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:44:11 GMT');
header('Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT');
header("X-Accel-Expires: 600");
header('Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0');
header('Pragma: no-cache');

Echo "Hello World !";

?>

if I comment/delete the line header('Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 
GMT'); the page is cached.

Even if I move header("X-Accel-Expires: 600") before header('Expires: 
Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT'); the page is cached
Same thing happen for the header Cache-Control. If is before 
X-Accel-Expires the page is not cached if is after it is !

The conf for NGINX is very standard and proxy_cache_valid is not 
specified.

Is this correct ? Where am I wrong ?

Thanks

--
Simone

Hello!

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 05:05:32PM +0100, Simone Fumagalli wrote:

> header('Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT');
> Even if I move header("X-Accel-Expires: 600") before header('Expires: Wed, 11 
Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT'); the page is cached
> Same thing happen for the header Cache-Control. If is before X-Accel-Expires the 
page is not cached if is after it is !
>
> The conf for NGINX is very standard and proxy_cache_valid is not specified.
>
> Is this correct ? Where am I wrong ?

This probably should be counted as a bug (or at least
misfeature).

Here are what happens: if the Expires header comes first, it
disables caching due to being set to date in the past.  The
X-Accel-Expires header which comes later can't re-enable caching.

On the other hand, if X-Accel-Expires comes first, it will set
cache expiration time.  The Expires and Cache-Control headers
later will be just ignored as cache expiration time is already
set.

As a workaround you may want to always sent X-Accel-Expires first,
or explicitly ignore other headers with proxy_ignore_headers.

Maxim Dounin

On 02/22/2012 05:28 PM, Maxim Dounin wrote:
> This probably should be counted as a bug (or at least misfeature).

Ciao, do you think you will fix/change this behaviour ?
Just to know if and how change my configurations

thanks

--
Simone

Hello!

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 05:39:22PM +0100, Simone Fumagalli wrote:

> On 02/22/2012 05:28 PM, Maxim Dounin wrote:
> > This probably should be counted as a bug (or at least misfeature).
>
> Ciao, do you think you will fix/change this behaviour ?
> Just to know if and how change my configurations

Eventually this will be fixed, but there are no immediate plans
to and it's relatively low priority.

Maxim Dounin