CODEWITHSUNDEEP
debuggingfirefoxcachinggoogle-chromebrowser
return1.at
return1.at

Reputation: 3140

How to circumvent cache revalidation on browser refresh?

Sometimes it is useful to measure you site´s performance in a full cached situation. But browsers make this hard to test, because on every manual page refresh it will revalidate all items, which results in a request for every resource on the webserver. Valid cacheitems will respond with a HTTP 304, invalid ones with a 200 OK. So you will end up with wrong timings for this particular use-case because of the latency to your webserver.

One solution is to open a new tab, then enter the site´s url, which results in my expected behaviour: Cached items are served from disk. As soon as you hit refresh, the items revalidate again.

This workflow (open tab, open tab, and so on) is kinda bad, so i want to ask, if anybody knows a better way to achieve this. Maybe there is a nicely hidden shortcut i missed so far out there on the internet.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 279

Answers (2)

schellmax
schellmax

Reputation: 6094

just add a bookmark and fill in the following in the 'url' field: javascript:location.href=location.href;

it does make perfectly sense for browsers to revalidate all resources of a given url whenever the 'reload' button is clicked, as this best complies with the intention of the user doing so - in other words, a 'reload' is expected to result in the display of 'fresh' data, instead of simply serving what's already in the browser cache. in addition to this, all major browser have implemented a way of actually fetching every single resource, bypassing any instructions in the http headers to cache it (such as a '304 not modified' status), using shortcuts like SHIFT/CTRL + R/F5.

Upvotes: 4

Boris Zbarsky
Boris Zbarsky

Reputation: 35074

In Firefox, just focus the url bar (Ctrl-L on Windows and Linux, Cmd-L on Mac) and hit enter. This is treated like a normal toplevel load of the url, not a reload.

Unfortunately, other browsers handle that sort of thing differently. The simplest way to deal cross-browser is probably to have a little harness page that loads the thing you want to reload in an iframe and has a button that sets subFrameWindow.location.href = subFrameWindow.location.href to trigger a new load....

Upvotes: 1

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