ETag and Last-Modified headers wanted

January 10, 2006 5:56 PM

I suggest adding the ETag and Last-Modified HTTP headers to all the pages and feeds to allow for HTTP response "304 Not Modified" in case the content hasn't been changed.
Advantages: Saves about 10-20% bandwidth/resources, and improves the coverage and freshness of search engines.
posted by Sharcho to Feature Requests at 5:56 PM (9 comments total)

Sure thing, any idea how to do that with ColdFusion CFMX 7 server?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:54 PM on January 10, 2006

A quick googling (etag coldfusion), gives this page
posted by Sharcho at 7:01 PM on January 10, 2006

Actually, for the RSS feeds, they're served up straight out of Apache 2.0 as plain text files, with no scripting of any kind. So I suppose I need to do something at the http.conf level for the server that serves up metafilter's RSS feed.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:21 PM on January 10, 2006

Actually the RSS feeds already have the ETag and Last-Modified fields.

Additional googling (304 last-modified cfheader) reveals a better example
posted by Sharcho at 7:26 PM on January 10, 2006

Static files do have this stuff done automatically by Apache.
posted by cillit bang at 7:33 PM on January 10, 2006

You can easily check these thing using the Cacheability query
posted by Sharcho at 7:35 PM on January 10, 2006

You usually don't see these tags on dynamically generated pages like metafilter. To do so would require the generating script to cache each copy of the page, so that every time it is generated it could be compared with the previous version. For a highly dynamic site this is just not feasible for the very moderate gain of being able to reply "304 not modified".
posted by Rhomboid at 3:41 AM on January 11, 2006

Metafilter is not dynamic, right? I think the pages were static and rebuilt on comment submission.
posted by Firas at 6:16 AM on January 11, 2006

mathowie, can you give an update on this?
posted by Sharcho at 6:33 PM on February 1, 2006