Agent Caching

Some read endpoints support agent caching. They are clearly marked in the documentation. Agent caching can take two forms, simple or background refresh depending on the endpoint's semantics. The documentation for each endpoint clearly identify which if any form of caching is supported. The details for each are described below.

Where supported, caching can be enabled though the ?cached parameter. Combining ?cached with ?consistent is an error.

Simple Caching

Endpoints supporting simple caching may return a result directly from the local agent's cache without a round trip to the servers. By default the agent caches results for a relatively long time (3 days) such that it can still return a result even if the servers are unavailable for an extended period to enable "fail static" semantics.

That means that with no other arguments, ?cached queries might receive a response which is days old. To request better freshness, the HTTP Cache-Control header may be set with a directive like max-age=<seconds>. In this case the agent will attempt to re-fetch the result from the servers if the cached value is older than the given max-age. If the servers can't be reached a 500 is returned as normal.

To allow clients to maintain fresh results in normal operation but allow stale ones if the servers are unavailable, the stale-if-error=<seconds> directive may be additionally provided in the Cache-Control header. This will return the cached value anyway even if it's older than max-age (provided it's not older than stale-if-error) rather than a 500. It must be provided along with a max-age or must-revalidate. The Age response header, if larger than max-age can be used to determine if the server was unreachable and a cached version returned instead.

For example, assuming there is a cached response that is 65 seconds old, and that the servers are currently unavailable, Cache-Control: max-age=30 will result in a 500 error, while Cache-Control: max-age=30 stale-if-error=259200 will result in the cached response being returned.

A request setting either max-age=0 or must-revalidate directives will cause the agent to always re-fetch the response from servers. Either can be combined with stale-if-error=<seconds> to ensure fresh results when the servers are available, but falling back to cached results if the request to the servers fails.

Requests that do not use ?cached currently bypass the cache entirely so the cached response returned might be more stale than the last uncached response returned on the same agent. If this causes problems, it is possible to make requests using ?cached and setting Cache-Control: must-revalidate to have always-fresh results yet keeping the cache populated with the most recent result.

In all cases the HTTP X-Cache header is always set in the response to either HIT or MISS indicating whether the response was served from cache or not.

For cache hits, the HTTP Age header is always set in the response to indicate how many seconds since that response was fetched from the servers.

Background Refresh Caching

Endpoints supporting background refresh caching may return a result directly from the local agent's cache without a round trip to the severs. The first fetch that is a miss will cause an initial fetch from the servers, but will also trigger the agent to begin a background blocking query that watches for any changes to that result and updates the cached value if changes occur.

Following requests will always be a cache hit until there has been no request for the resource for the TTL (which is typically 3 days).

Clients can perform blocking queries against the local agent which will be served from the cache. This allows multiple clients to watch the same resource locally while only a single blocking watch for that resource will be made to the servers from a given client agent.

HTTP Cache-Control headers are ignored in this mode since the cache is being actively updated and has different semantics to a typical passive cache.

In all cases the HTTP X-Cache header is always set in the response to either HIT or MISS indicating whether the response was served from cache or not.

For cache hits, the HTTP Age header is always set in the response to indicate how many seconds since that response was fetched from the servers. As long as the local agent has an active connection to the servers, the age will always be 0 since the value is up-to-date. If the agent gets disconnected, the cached result is still returned but with an Age that indicates how many seconds have elapsed since the local agent got disconnected from the servers, during which time updates to the result might have been missed.