NOTE: This is a work in progress. Please send questions, comments, or suggestions to r@tomayko.com.
General ------- # ### Q: Can I use Rack::Cache with Rails? Rack::Cache can be used with Rails 2.3 or above. Documentation and a sample application is forthcoming; in the mean time, see [this example of using Rack::Cache with Rails 2.3](http://snippets.aktagon.com/snippets/302-How-to-setup-and-use-Rack-Cache-with-Rails-2-3-0-RC-1). # ### Q: Why Rack::Cache? Why not Squid, Varnish, Perlbol, etc.? __Rack::Cache__ is often easier to setup as part of your existing Ruby application than a separate caching system. __Rack::Cache__ runs entirely inside your backend application processes - no separate / external process is required. This lets __Rack::Cache__ scale down to development environments and simple deployments very easily while not sacrificing the benefits of a standards-based approach to caching. # ### Q: Why Rack::Cache? Why not use Rails/Merb/FrameworkX's caching system? __Rack::Cache__ takes a standards-based approach to caching that provides some benefits over framework-integrated systems. It uses standard HTTP headers (`Expires`, `Cache-Control`, `Etag`, `Last-Modified`, etc.) to determine what/when to cache. Designing applications to support these standard HTTP mechanisms gives the benefit of being able to switch to a different HTTP cache implementation in the future. In addition, using a standards-based approach to caching creates a clear separation between application and caching logic. The application need only specify a basic set of information about the response and all decisions regarding how and when to cache is moved into the caching layer. # ### Q: Will Rack::Cache make my app scale? No. Your design is the only thing that can make your app scale. Also, __Rack::Cache__ is not overly optimized for performance. The main goal of the project is to provide a portable, easy-to-configure, and standards-based caching solution for small to medium sized deployments. More sophisticated / performant caching systems (e.g., [Varnish][v], [Squid][s], [httpd/mod-cache][h]) may be more appropriate for large deployments with crazy-land throughput requirements. [v]: http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/ [s]: http://www.squid-cache.org/ [h]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_cache.html Features -------- # ### Q: Does Rack::Cache support validation? Yes. Both freshness and validation-based caching is supported. A response will be cached if it has a freshness lifetime (e.g., `Expires` or `Cache-Control: max-age=N` headers) and/or includes a validator (e.g., `Last-Modified` or `ETag` headers). When the cache hits and the response is fresh, it's delivered immediately without talking to the backend application; when the cache is stale, the cached response is validated using a conditional GET request. # ### Q: Does Rack::Cache support fragment caching? Not really. __Rack::Cache__ deals with entire responses and doesn't know anything about how your application constructs them. However, something like [ESI](http://www.w3.org/TR/esi-lang) may be implemented in the future (likely as a separate Rack middleware component that could be situated upstream from Rack::Cache), which would allow applications to compose responses based on several "fragment resources". Each fragment would have its own cache policy. # ### Q: How do I manually purge or expire a cached entry? Although planned, there is currently no mechanism for manually purging an entry stored in the cache. Note that using an `Expires` or `Cache-Control: max-age=N` header and relying on manual purge to invalidate cached entry can often be implemented more simply using efficient validation based caching (`Last-Modified`, `Etag`). Many web frameworks are based entirely on manual purge and do not support validation at the cache level. # ### Q: What does "Efficient Validation" mean? It means that your application performs only the processing necessary to determine if a response is valid before sending a `304 Not Modified` in response to a conditional GET request. Many applications that perform validation do so only after the entire response has been generated, which provides bandwidth savings but results in no CPU/IO savings. Implementing validation efficiently can increase backend application throughput significantly when fronted by a validating caching system (like __Rack::Cache__). [Here's an example Rack application](http://gist.github.com/9395) that performs efficient validation. # ### Q: Did you just make that up? Yes. # ### Q: Can I do HTTPS with Rack::Cache? Sure. HTTPS is typically managed by a front-end web server so this isn't really relevant to Rack::Cache.