Boomi Cloud API Management Developer Blog

We are excited to announce that with last night’s release, Mashery has included additional caching optimizations around handling If-Modified-Since header. This HTTP header can be quite useful to improve response times and reduce traffic bandwidth between client applications and your API back-end systems. The way If-Modified-Since header works is very simple. It simply allows any system that honors this header to evaluate if content has been modified since the date specified in the request. If content has not been modified since the date, the system responds back with “304 Not Modified” without sending back the entire payload. This way client applications can reliably use local caches to fulfill responses, speed up response times and avoid unnecessary response payloads getting downloaded from API back-end systems

To understand how this works and to benefit from this feature, you must first enable Mashery cache for the API end-point.

If an application sends a request with If-Modified-Since header against that end-point, Traffic Manager will first check if a valid response can be delivered from cache. If Mashery cache has a valid response, Traffic Manager will evaluate if the cached response needs to be revalidated against API back-end system based on additional directives such as “max-age”, “s-maxage”, "must-revalidate”. If revalidation is not called for, Traffic Manager will return back with a “304 Not Modified” response avoiding request / response roundtrip to the API back-end system. Even if revalidation is called for, Traffic Manager performs additional optimizations and converts the request to a conditional request to minimize traffic bandwidth to your API back-end system. If the API back-end system responds back with “304 Not Modified” in this case, Traffic Manager will deliver the valid response from Mashery cache. If the API back-end system responds back with a “200 OK”,  response is delivered as usual to the client application and updated in cache.