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 F. 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 D.

On 02/22/2012 05:28 PM, Maxim D. 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 F. wrote:

On 02/22/2012 05:28 PM, Maxim D. 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 D.