Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

Automatic version detection, revalidation, prewarming... caching seems so complicated these days. Forgive me for starting a sentence with "why don't we just"... but why don't we just use the hash of the object as the cache key and be done with it? You get integrity validation as a bonus to boot.

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css?hash=sha384-5rcfZgbOPW7..." integrity="sha384-5rcfZgbOPW7..."/>

    Etag: "sha384-5rcfZgbOPW7..."
    Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, immutable

Sure, but where's the fun in that? Then you wouldn't be able to write "we architected a caching layer"! To their credit, at least this isn't the actual title of the article, but it still left me wondering if an actual architect (you know, the kind of architect that designs buildings) would say "I architected this"?

Because you want the ability to invalidate the cache for an entire site at the same time. So you would still need some map between domain and hash.

You don't need to invalidate anything if the cache is keyed on the hash of the served objects. To put it another way, a hash-keyed cache results in perfectly precise, instant, distributed cache invalidation. Read the code in my comment again.

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