Why we recommend against using Expires headers

Although the Expires header looks like it might be better at first glance, there are several reasons we recommend you use the Cache-Control headers instead:

  • You have to be careful with the Expires header that all your pages do not expire at the same time.

    If all your content expires at once, anybody synchronizing at that time will suddenly hit your server instead of the M-Business Sync Server's cache and you will experience a dramatic spike in traffic on your server. This spike generally lasts about a minute, and we do some work to help minimize the spike, but you will still get it.

  • At least with Apache, it is a little easier to set specific Cache-Control headers for specific pages.

  • There are some nice customizations you can add on to the Cache-Control headers (which we will detail below).