05.3 Controlling Freshness with the Expires HTTP Header
The Expires HTTP header is a basic means of controlling caches; it tells all caches how long the associated representation is fresh for. After that time, caches will always check back with the origin server to see if a document is changed. Expires headers are supported by practically every cache.
Most Web servers allow you to set Expires response headers in a number of ways. Commonly, they will allow setting an absolute time to expire, a time based on the last time that the client retrieved the representation (last access time), or a time based on the last time the document changed on your server (last modification time).
Expires headers are especially good for making static images (like navigation bars and buttons) cacheable. Because they don’t change much, you can set extremely long expiry time on them, making your site appear much more responsive to your users. They’re also useful for controlling caching of a page that is regularly changed. For instance, if you update a news page once a day at 6am, you can set the representation to expire at that time, so caches will know when to get a fresh copy, without users having to hit ‘reload’.
The only value valid in an Expires header is a HTTP date; anything else will most likely be interpreted as ‘in the past’, so that the representation is uncacheable. Also, remember that the time in a HTTP date is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), not local time.
For example:
Expires: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:19:41 GMT
It’s important to make sure that your Web server’s clock is accurate if you use the Expires header. One way to do this is using the Network Time Protocol (NTP); talk to your local system administrator to find out more.
Although the Expires header is useful, it has some limitations. First, because there’s a date involved, the clocks on the Web server and the cache must be synchronised; if they have a different idea of the time, the intended results won’t be achieved, and caches might wrongly consider stale content as fresh.
Another problem with Expires is that it’s easy to forget that you’ve set some content to expire at a particular time. If you don’t update an Expires time before it passes, each and every request will go back to your Web server, increasing load and latency.