Testing Cache Behavior

This page provides some hints on how you can check that your content is cached by the QUANTIL CDN according to rules created when adding or editing your domain.

By default, QUANTIL caches your content based on the rules described here.

If the default cache behavior does not meet your requirements, you can create rules to customize caching of your content.

Once you have deployed your domain, be sure to modify your domain’s DNS record to use your assigned CNAME.  Then you will be able to use a browser to check that requests for your content are served by QUANTIL.  

Test your cache rules using Google Chrome Devtools:

• Open the Google Chrome browser.
• Open Chrome’s Developer tools, and click Network to see the Network panel.
• Visit the URL you wish to check.
• The left panel of Chrome’s Developer Tools will show the names of resources downloaded when handling your request.
• Click on a resource name.  The Headers tab on the right hand side will show HTTP headers corresponding to that resource.  Look for “Remote Address” under the ‘Generation” section.   Its value is the IP address serving your content.
• Reload the URL until you see a remote address which is NOT one of your origin IP addresses.  This should represent a QUANTIL PoP (point of presence).

In the example below, 70.39.191.174 is a QUANTIL IP address.  The “Age: 1” response header indicates that the resource is cached by QUANTIL. The X-Via header indicates the particular server within the PoP that handled your request.  

To ensure you use the same QUANTIL server in your test of cache rules, edit your local hosts file by adding an entry mapping your domain name to the remote IP address reported earlier.

In the above example, we would add:  70.39.191.174 www.quantil.com.

On Windows based systems, edit %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

On Unix based systems, edit /etc/hosts.

After modifying your hosts file, request the resource in Chrome multiple times.  The same remote address should appear indicating one PoP is handling your request.  Making multiple requests ensures that the servers within the PoP cache your content.

Once you have completed your test, you can remove the entry you added to your hosts file.