Good Caching practices

pros/cons

[mattglet]

I have a site done in ASP with about 20,000 visitors per day, on a dedicated server. A majority of the pages are pretty static, and some are pretty dynamic.

I have thought about turning on the caching feature in IIS 6 to lower bandwidth consumption. Is this a good idea? I can always add the no-cache headers on the pages I do not want cached, but is there any downfall to turning it on globally? If I turn it on, do I *need* to set it to expire, or can I keep it on the "never expire" option? I've read about caching a bunch, but it seems like a pretty intense topic, where I really just need a simple answer or two.

-Matt

[duckhunter]

It is a pretty intense topic. Sounds like you may be confusing Caching with Content Expiration. The Content Expiration you reference that can be set in IIS Manager is client specific not global from user to user. This will help when repeat visitors come and don't have to request a new version of an image/file/etc they already have on disk.

By default IIS "caches" the last 100 pages so some caching is happening automatically for you. You can increase the number via the registry but will adversely affect memory usage. Finding your optimal caching level depends on traffic, hardware, dynamic -vs- static pages, etc.

Here are a few articles on the topic we used when optimizing our servers.
[support.microsoft.com ]

[support.microsoft.com ]

[mattglet]

Sorry, duckhunter you are correct. I did mix them up. Content Expiration is what I'm talking about. What are the pros/cons, if any?

-Matt