[mapserver-dev] Cache-control in WMS Requests

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:43:50AM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> For reasons of "user ease" having things like this configured in one
> place is handy ("how do I improve my Openlayers performance?" "add
> this one line"). I'm going to test this morning though, and see how
> much difference this one header makes to browsers in terms of actual
> caching behavior 

It should be significant, based on my experience.

> (they might ignore the header because the URL is "cgi-shaped", etc,
> etc).

I've never had that problem.

> Unfortunately the rest of the headers that affect caching (last
> modified, etag, etc) are probably off the table, since they can't be
> tracked properly in a dynamic environment.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Perhaps by default you would want such
tracking 'off', but certainly one could have a setting which says "use
the last modified time of the mapfile for these things", and use the
etag/last-modified for that. (Admittedly, it requires more work.) 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta