Cached Components
Deflect handles web pages composed of many elements, including CSS, Javascript, multimedia and large binary files. Page components that are hosted on different domains (“widgets,” traffic trackers, etc) are handled in the regular manner.
Deflect currently caches responses for 10 min, which can be tuned for individual locations (longer for infrequently changing binary files, shorter for online forums for example) in the control panel.
Cookies
While Deflect currently ignores cookies, returning the same object from the cache regardless of any cookies present in the client request, it is configurable on a per-domain and per-path basis. We can enable unique treatment of different cookies for a site or part of a site, however in doing so, we effectively disable our ability to cache that site or part of site. Nevertheless, the site will still be protected by our firewall analysis. Query strings are treated as part of the URL – different query strings will always be considered unique objects and cached as such. Responses to POST requests are never cached.
Is it working?
You can tell Deflect is serving a page by looking at the HTTP headers (using ‘Inspect Element’ on Chrome or Firefox); you’ll see a Via: string that returns an individual edge serving the requested webpage. It will look similar to:
Via:http/1.1 prometeus1.deflect.ca (ApacheTrafficServer/3.2.4 [uIcMsSfWpNeN:t cCMi p sS])
The caching response, in the above case [uIcMsSfWpNeN:t cCMi p sS] can be interpreted here.
DNS
DNS is configured for short TTL (“time to live”) to allow rapid addition/removal of nodes to the edge pool.
If you have any more questions, please see our FAQ or contact us and we’ll do our best to answer it.