Internal Max-Stale

Category: Caching

Purpose: Controls how long past the normal expiration time a cached asset may be served from an edge server when the edge server is unable to revalidate the cached asset with the origin server.

Normally, when an asset's max-age time expires, the edge server will send a revalidation request to the origin server. The origin server will then respond with either a 304 Not Modified to give the edge server a fresh lease on the cached asset, or else with 200 OK to provide the edge server with an updated version of the cached asset.

If the edge server is unable to establish a connection with the origin server while attempting such a revalidation, then this Internal Max-Stale feature controls whether, and for how long, the edge server may continue to serve the now-stale asset.

Note that this time interval starts when the asset's max-age expires, not when the failed revalidation occurs. Therefore, the maximum period during which an asset can be served without successful revalidation is the amount of time specified by the combination of max-age plus max-stale. For example, if an asset was cached at 9:00 with a max-age of 30 minutes and a max-stale of 15 minutes, then a failed revalidation attempt at 9:44 would result in an end-user receiving the stale cached asset, while a failed revalidation attempt at 9:46 would result in the end user receiving a 504 Gateway Timeout.

Any value configured for this feature is superseded by Cache-Control:must-revalidate or Cache-Control:proxy-revalidate headers received from the origin server. If either of those headers is received from the origin server when an asset is initially cached, then the edge server will not serve a stale cached asset. In such a case, if the edge server is unable to revalidate with the origin when the asset's max-age interval has expired, then the edge server will return a 504 Gateway Timeout.

Key information:

• Configure this feature by performing the following steps:

  1. Select the status code for which this max-stale policy will be applied.

     This feature is only applicable when the response to the request results in the selected status code.

  2. Specify an integer value and then selecting the desired time unit (i.e., seconds, minutes, hours, etc.). This value defines the internal max-stale that will be applied.

• Due to the manner in which cache settings are tracked, this feature cannot be associated with the following match conditions:

  • AS Number
  • Client IP Address
  • Cookie Parameter Literal
  • Cookie Parameter Regex
  • Cookie Parameter Wildcard
  • Country
  • Device
  • Edge CNAME
  • Referring Domain Literal
  • Referring Domain Wildcard
  • Request Header Literal
  • Request Header Regex
  • Request Header Wildcard
  • Request Method
  • Request Scheme
  • URL Query Literal
  • URL Query Regex
  • URL Query Wildcard
  • URL Query Parameter Literal
  • URL Query Parameter Wildcard
• Each stale response includes a Warning response header.

Default Behavior: 2 minutes

Edgecast CDN