Getting ETags right
I’ve been reading a book and I have a particular question about the ETag chapter. The author says that ETags might harm performance and that you must tune them finely or disable them completely. I already know what ETags are and understand the risks, but is it that hard to get ETags right? I’ve just made an application that sends an ETag whose value is the MD5 hash of the response body. This is a simple solution, easy to achieve in many languages. Is using MD5 hash of the response body as ETag wrong? If so, why? Why the author (who obviously outsmarts me by many orders of magnitude) does not