Welcome to The Cache Project

The goal is to convince web server administrators to create more meaningful page headers so cache servers can cache content.

Problem

HTTP has changed significantly since HTTP 1.1. There are lots of features which can be use effectively to cache pages. There are so many signals now that can be used to effectively cache a particular content.

If you see the traffic which gets out from networks you can see the biggest traffic hogs of our times are updates, If you look closely you can see browser updates, your application updates (iTunes,google play store) and adobe, java updates(if you still have enabled) are the main sources of bandwidth hog.

If you are maintaining a network with developers you will know how big of a problem google android developer tools and frameworks updates and Github Repos are. Due to cache config problems, most of the content listed here and above is very difficult to cache.

i.e.

1) If you are handling the network of 500 users and all of them have chrome installed. Chrome binary is around 50 MB. and in a week it updates at least once. due to its Vary headers right now cache servers cannot cache it. So to calculate the bandwidth 500*50 = 25000 MB or 25 GB, just for that one browser upgrade. think about it if google has right config operations set your cache can save 24.9 GB's for you. It will also help google to serve more clients as their network resources are not used once the initial request is cached.

If you have developers working on projects then you can find similarly GitHub repository's usage very high but again due to GitHub's servers not having server config which can allow cache server to cache then a significant amount of bandwidth can be saved and network load can also be reduced. and same time Github will save precious server resources as content is stored in a cache and retrieve by the cache server.

Solution

The project will provide ideal configurations for different type of servers. So system administrators can use it in their projects. Once they implement this configuration cache servers can cache those resources.

To push this to bigger networks like google and GitHub we will need help from you and others whom you can send this message. If we all try together we can push our message to bigger companies and that way we can resolve the issue.

Benefits

Server administrators can save precious bandwidth as their content can be cached.