Understanding Browser-Based Caching

A modern web browser can cache the information that it receives from a web server in several ways. Its preference settings determine how much storage space to use for caching, as well as the criteria by which it should refresh its cache.

How the Portal Controls Browser-Based Caching

If the browser is accessing a straight HTML page, it caches the page as a whole. If it's accessing a frameset, it caches the individual frames in the frameset so that each frame's content can be refreshed independently.

Rather than depend on users to enable and set the timing criteria for caching, PeopleSoft portal technology takes advantage of a feature of HTTP. The portal web server can specify a caching interval in the HTTP response header of the HTML page or frame content that it delivers. The browser applies this value to determine when to stop using its cached copy of the data and request the most recent version from the server.

Note:

Even when the browser requests a fresh copy of an HTML page or frame content, the portal web server controls whether the content it sends is cached data or fresh data based on its own caching settings.

When to Disable Browser-Based Caching

The caching system increases system response performance in typical production environments in which users access the portal web site by using computers that have been assigned specifically to them or computers that they own. However, some environments don't conform to this scenario.

You should consider disabling browser-based caching in these environments:

• Any environment in which multiple users access the same computer.

  These include kiosk-type environments—such as libraries, shared work spaces, and so on—in which multiple users access the same machine. Users might access the same machine within minutes of each other before the browser cache for the previous user times out. Security is enforced in this situation, but the new user may be confused by an inability to access certain items.

• A development or testing environment.

  When content references are created or changed for a portal during development or testing, the new data might not appear to be immediately available due to caching.

• Any environment in which you are using web server-based navigation caching.