468837 - Redirects of different types are not cached correctly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Linus Mårtensson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

The cache settings for temporary and permanent redirect (the ones I tested) are ignored. According to RFC2616 all redirects should obey cache settings, quoting from 301, "This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise." and 307, "This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field."
For comparison, I tested this in quickly Opera where it seems to work as intended.

A desired functionality would be for the cache settings to be obeyed if the target page works. (200?)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
build a small page like:

<?php
session_cache_limiter("nocache");
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Permanent Redirect");
header("Location: http://www.google.com");

change the header as necessary to test the problem.
Actual Results:  
The reproduction steps above are for a permanent redirect, what you'd expect is for both requests to be repeated if the cache is disabled for this redirect but what happens is that a second request arrives at www.google.com even if the Location header is changed.

Expected Results:  
Since the cache is disabled, the original request should have been repeated. Similarily for 307 Temporary Redirect, the response should be stored if the header asks the browser to cache the request.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Can you please test with a recent build like 3.0.4 and be sure that you don't have for example livehttpheaders or Firebug enabled in Firefox.

2.0.0.6 is very old, the latest is 2.0.0.18 but that is at the "End of life"

Comment 2

[Linus Mårtensson]

Trying in 3.0.5 and I'm getting the opposite behaviour now, no matter what kind of cache settings I send in the header, the permanent redirect is not cached. That is, the original request is repeated rather than stored in the cache.

All plugins and addons are disabled.

(Sorry about the old version before, uni runs Debian and it's tied with Duke Nukem Forever for releases.)

Comment 3

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

307 redirects are wfm now