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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

If I mouse-over the same link 10 times, it looks in my network tab like it downloads the link 10 times.

I'd expect this preload script to remember the pages it's already fetched and not duplicate work unnecessarily. :/

Perhaps the author could add a script parameter, or support an optional 'preload-cache-for' attribute, so you'd write <a preload-cache-for="300s" ...>

If you really care about speed anyway, you should already have setup your site to max out caching opportunities (Etag, Last-modified, and replying "not-modified" to "if-modified-since" queries) - I'd suggest the author should ensure the script does support caching to the broadest extent possible - hitting your site whenever appropriate.

Cache-Control headers already do a better job of solving that problem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

Set your http cache headers correctly to instruct the client to save and re-use pages it downloads.

Yeah, this is likely something I need to look into. Since the site changes quite a bit for, non-logged vs logged, I'm not really doing much html caching right now. I'll check that out though. Even if I added something like 30 second cache TTL that might work. I'd have to see if that is even possible and test though. Maybe force an update on login? I'm not a html cache pro so I'd need to see what the options are and then do some testing. For now, it was just fast enough / not worth the time, to do anything other than a fresh page for each request. But, this is a good suggestion. Thanks.

ps. I do tons of caching for any images and videos though. I know those things never change so have weeks of caching enabled.

But how do you know it's still fresh?

HTTP has multiple cache control headers. It's a fairly complex topic, but TL;DR: do the config and it works in any browser since ~2000 (yes, even IE6).

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