SUMMARY: Will mod_headers (or another module) allow me to add a custom header to certain file types served, setting an expiration date? Will using that solution be better than an application accelerator for a scaling application?
My company handed my team a project that will need to scale "easily" and I've got some serious questions concerning using apache or purchasing an application accelerator solution.
The project will be a suite of online web apps programmed in Adobe Flex. And unlike our previous web apps we need to make sure that any older versions of the many swf files will not be used once we've deployed new versions. Disabling caching entirely isn't an option.
Since the swf files will be browser cached, I thought that we could use custom headers for the swf file type. And that header would set a weekly/bi-weekly expiration date. Is that possible either with mod_headers or another apache module?
After I talked to the other engineers about that possibility, a network consultant we currently have monitoring/maintaining our server, said that it would be ridiculously hard to do and to replication when we add more web servers. He instead recommended using an application accelerator ($18k). From what he explained, that box would keep the files on it's hd and we could specify exactly when we'd want the files to be re-fetched and not pulled from browser cache.
My company handed my team a project that will need to scale "easily" and I've got some serious questions concerning using apache or purchasing an application accelerator solution.
The project will be a suite of online web apps programmed in Adobe Flex. And unlike our previous web apps we need to make sure that any older versions of the many swf files will not be used once we've deployed new versions. Disabling caching entirely isn't an option.
Since the swf files will be browser cached, I thought that we could use custom headers for the swf file type. And that header would set a weekly/bi-weekly expiration date. Is that possible either with mod_headers or another apache module?
After I talked to the other engineers about that possibility, a network consultant we currently have monitoring/maintaining our server, said that it would be ridiculously hard to do and to replication when we add more web servers. He instead recommended using an application accelerator ($18k). From what he explained, that box would keep the files on it's hd and we could specify exactly when we'd want the files to be re-fetched and not pulled from browser cache.