[jira] Commented: (HTTPCLIENT-990) CachingHttpClient does not return from cache responses having only the public cache-control directive

["Jonathan Moore (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HTTPCLIENT-990?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12907204#action_12907204 ] 

Jonathan Moore commented on HTTPCLIENT-990:
-------------------------------------------

Hi Vianney,

Let me start by saying that this is known behavior that is compliant with the RFC (as you note, caching responses without freshness information is a MAY in the protocol spec, not a MUST or a SHOULD). As such, this should not be marked as a "bug".

The protocol spec clearly talks about ways to handle these responses; one is by heuristically estimating a freshness lifetime, usually based on a comparison of the Last-Modified header with the Date header in the response.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.2.2
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.2.4

I would suggest re-classifying this issue as an "improvement" titled "allow heuristic freshness caching" that can be turned on as an optional feature.

Please note that even with this feature, your origin server is not really providing as much information as it could be. The RFC explicitly suggests that having origin servers correctly set cache-related headers is preferable to heuristic expiration calculations. In particular, if your intent is that the response can be completely served from cache, the origin ought to set either the Expires header or the max-age parameter on Cache-Control. If your intent is just that the response body be cached but that you will allow revalidation, you need to include a validator in the response (either ETag or Last-Modified).


> CachingHttpClient does not return from cache responses having only the public cache-control directive
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HTTPCLIENT-990
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HTTPCLIENT-990
>             Project: HttpComponents HttpClient
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Cache
>    Affects Versions: 4.1 Alpha2
>            Reporter: Vianney Carel
>            Priority: Minor
>         Attachments: debug.log
>
>
> I noticed that the CachingHttpClient behaves strangely when it receives responses with only the public cache-control directive, e.g.:
> HTTP/1.0 200 OK
> Server: My test server
> Cache-control: public
> Content-Length: 1
> 1
> Using a debugger, I could see that the response is cached. But when the response is queried from the cache, it is not considered as "fresh".
> According to the HTTP RFC, such responses "may" be cached (I understand it as a "should" in our case)... but there's no reason to put responses in the cache if we don't use them later one.
> The "freshness of the response is analysed after the response is queried from the cache, thanks to:
> CachedResponseSuitabilityChecker#canCachedResponseBeUsed()
> ... calling CacheEntry#isResponseFresh()
> ... returning true if the response date (getCurrentAgeSecs()) is lower than its use-by date (getFreshnessLifetimeSecs())
> The issue is that getFreshnessLifetimeSecs() returns 0 when there is no max-age directive.
> This could be fixed by replacing the code of CacheEntry#isResponseFresh() by:
>     public boolean isResponseFresh() {
>         final long freshnessLifetime = getFreshnessLifetimeSecs();
>         if (freshnessLifetime == 0) {
>             return true;
>         }
>         return (getCurrentAgeSecs() < getFreshnessLifetimeSecs());
>     }
> But i'm not 100% confident about not producing some bad side-effects...

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