Web Caching and Replication

13.7. Summary

This chapter considers the problem of uncacheable content from two sides. On one side, we argue that while there are many legitimate needs causing the content provider to disallow or limit caching, the content provider can often satisfy these needs by designing the Web site in a cache-friendly way. Through cache-friendly design, content providers can leverage someone else's infrastructure—proxies' for example—to improve access to their content. Blind cache busting is not in the interests of content providers and, conversely, being cache friendly is not just a question of good network manners.

Table 13.1 summarizes reasons why a content provider may need to disallow caching, methods of designing a site to satisfy content provider ...