It's important that your website or application has the best possible performance, even when traffic increases, e.g., during busy times like the holiday season. Otherwise, your team risks losing sales and customers to the competition. As an administrator, you can significantly improve the performance of your site during heavy traffic, by adjusting delivery cache time to live.
When a user visits your website or application that uses the Acoustic Content APIs, the browser or other client will make HTTP requests to get the content and assets required to display the website or application. The responses to the very first requests will be retrieved from the Acoustic Content data center in the US or EU. They will be then cached in both the user’s browser or client and in one of 240,000 Akamai edge servers located as close to end-users as possible. If the user visits the page again, it will display faster since the API responses are already stored in the browser or client.
Note: Other users will also experience improvements with load times for the page since they are served API responses from the Akamai layer. If many users from a similar location access the page, the load time will be even faster as the responses will be cached in an Akamai edge server very close to these users.
Adjust delivery time to live
You can control the time for when content HTTP responses are cached. We call it the “time to live.” This setting will control how long responses are cached for both Akamai and the browser (or other client). When the time to live expires, a subsequent request will be retrieved from the Acoustic Content data center. Akamai and the browser (or other client) will then once again cache this latest version of the request. If there have been any changes to the content, it is only at this point that the user will see them.
Delivery API cache times can be controlled by your administrator in Settings.
Asset controls are implemented as the “max-age” directive in the “Cache-Control” header. If an asset is updated and republished, the asset will be invalidated in Akamai's cache so that Akamai will immediately respect the change. If the asset is not updated, it will be cached at Akamai edge servers for 24 hours.
Choose your preferred update delay
You can control the time to live in the Admin settings of Acoustic Content. The default value for the Delivery Cache API results is 90 seconds. This means that published updates to your website or application may not appear for your users for 90 seconds. Making this number higher will make your website or application more responsive – that is, faster page load times – because a large percentage of requests will be served from Akamai and your users’ browser or client.
Choose a number that is the highest possible delay you can accept for Content updates being made visible to your users. This will ensure the best possible performance for your website or application.
Note: This setting applies to all of the delivery APIs shown in this Developer Center article except “Delivery resources”. Resources have a fixed time to live of 1 week.