Is Chrome ignoring Cache-Control: max-age?

Question

Background:

• IIS 7
• AspNet 3.5 web app

Chrome dev tools lists 98 requests for the home page of the web app (aspx + js + css + images). I

Answer 1

Chrome appears to be ignoring your Cache-Control settings if you're reloading in the same tab. If you copy the URL to a new tab and load it there, Chrome will respect the cache control tags and reuse the contents from the cache.

As an example I had this Ruby Sinatra app:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'sinatra'

before do
  content_type :txt
end

get '/' do
  headers "Cache-Control" => "public, must-revalidate, max-age=3600",
          "Expires" => Time.at(Time.now.to_i + (60 * 60)).to_s
  "This page rendered at #{Time.now}."
end

When I continuously reloaded it in the same Chrome tab it would display the new time.

This page rendered at 2014-10-08 13:36:46 -0400.
This page rendered at 2014-10-08 13:36:48 -0400.

The headers looked like this:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
< Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate, max-age=3600
< Expires: 2014-10-08 13:36:46 -0400
< Content-Length: 48
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Connection: keep-alive
* Server thin is not blacklisted
< Server: thin

However accessing the same URL, http://localhost:4567/ from multiple new tabs would recycle the previous result from the cache.