ETags and loadbalancers
A few weeks ago the company I work with noticed a weird problem with its CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider. They noticed that HEAD requests were being responded to by the CDN edge nodes using objects in the cache which had already expired. Whats worse is that even after an explicit content expiry notification was sent, the HEAD responses were still wrong. Long story short, the CDN provider had to setup bypass rules for the HEAD requests so that it always bypasses the cache. There was a slight performance overhead with this, but the workaround solved the problem. Now while this was going on, one of the guys at the CDN support helping us mentioned something about Etags and why we should be using it. I didn't understand how Etags would solve the problem if the CDN itself had a bug which was ignoring expiry information, but I said I'll investigate. Anyway, the traditional way of communicating object expiry is using the Last-Modified timestamp. ETags is another way of doing t