Conditional GETs

[Ricardo Newbery]

On Jul 28, 2007, at 1:08 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Ricardo Newbery <ric at digitalmarbles.com> writes:
>> I'm a little unsure as I didn't hear an affirmation to my question...
>> so does Varnish respect max-age and s-maxage in the response?
>
> Yes, see r1386.


Ahh... okay.  Thanks.

Now back to the question about INM requests.  After some thought, I  
guess I'm less interested about trying to replicate INM in VCL but am  
still interested in how Varnish refreshes it's own cache.

Since Varnish respects the maxage controls, this implies that when  
the next request comes in after expiry it will generate a conditional  
request (if Last-Modified is set) to refresh it's cache.  Correct?

But no INM to the backend will ever be generated regardless of the  
presence of an ETag.  Correct?

In my own use case (Plone CMS), etags are leveraged as a convenient  
index hash for the server's pagecache in RAM.  But in order to serve  
from the pagecache, we need an INM in the request.  So I'm trying to  
understand the implications of Varnish's ETag behavior on this process.

Ric