IIS5 cache weirdness

Hi,

We have a couple of Win2k/IIS5 webservers with a really weird bug we can't explain, whenever we update files, be it straight HTML files or JPEG's, it sometimes takes up to 1-2 minutes for the server to start serving the updated file. It's definitely server-related and not browser cache/proxy-related because it happens regardless of browser, even on the server console itself.

Any ideas?

/Daniel

very strange.

Have you tried turning content expiration on and to expire immediatly?

Have a look at the value at this regkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\InetInfo\Parameters\MemoryCacheSize

This is the size of the IIS cache for www & ftp. You can set this to 0 to turn of caching but it could give a big performance hit.

Displeaser

content expiration would only cause browsers to ignore any cached copies right? I can even reproduce this using wget, which to my knowledge does not care one bit about caching.

I don't have a regkey like that one, only DispatchEntries and ListenBackLog in that directory. However there are some settings like that in the global properties for IIS, under server extensions and performance settings, settings like "in-memory document cache", "include file cache" and "image file cache" but these seems to be default values for IIS5 and nothing I would want to toy with on a production server.

I've tested the behavior of this problem a little more and it seems if I just update a file without accessing it, it will update within 30 seconds, but if I keep refreshing it in a browser, it won't update at all.

Hi,

have a look at this article. It looks like it could be where you get the issue from.



Hope this helps.
Displeaser

thanks for the tip, I'll try these tweaks out during off hours. still it puzzles me that these IIS installations can't seem to acknowledge file changes.

No problem. Probably best to try them on test/qa/dev servers first (if available) before promoting to production

Displeaser