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I'm struggling with my IIS setup regarding caching, here's a brief description of my problem:

I'm making a site for mobile and non-mobile, sharing the same controllers. IE: mysite/page will serve either mysite/page.cshtml, or mysite/M/page.cshtml, depending on the device.

Here's the catch, it worked fine with my local and integration environment (cassiini and iis 6), but on another machine (2008r2/iis 7.5), apparently there is an aggressive server-side caching policy:

  • If I access the website from a desktop machine, I have the correct pages (desktop version)
  • If now I use my mobile phone to access the site, I will have the desktop version, (which implies a server-side cache, my phone is not using the same network).

On the contrary, if I were to restart the server and access the site using my phone first, then I will get the mobile version on my desktop (only for the pages I already visited of course).

I tried 2 solutions so far:

Disabling OutputCache from my Web.config:

<httpModules> [..] <remove name="OutputCache" /> </httpModules>

And unchecking "Enable output cache" in "Output Caching" for my site in IIS.

What's bugging me is that I do not have this problem with my other server (iis 6.0), although caching is enabled on this one, which leads me to think it is related to iis 7 caching addition.

My question is simple: how does one disable server-side caching on IIS 7.5?

Thanks in advance for your iis lights!

Found it!

Sorry guys you could not really guess that one, I extend RazorViewEngine (actually I used a sample mobile mvc3 template app), and this class overrides FindView, it is supposed to take into account a useCache parameter, but apparently no matter how I configure IIS, it was set to true with iis7. I set it to false everywhere. I'll look into appropriate tuning of that parameter tomorrow.

public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache)

Thanks for your help guys, I have a good understanding of all the caching possibilities with IIS now ;). It's interesting that this behaves differently with IIS 7.0 (IIS6 and Cassiini were consistent).

Edit:

More info: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/workitem/8201?PendingVoteId=8201 , it is related to debug/release working of FindView.

This was my exact problem: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/workitem/8201?PendingVoteId=8201

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  • hard to guess without knowing you are extending the engine : ) Commented Nov 28, 2011 at 20:55
  • I forgot to add that in the equation, I did not suspect MVC could be caching the view resolution itself. Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 0:30

3 Answers 3

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As Rick said, you need to profile this first. A quick test though would be to implement a no-cache controller as I outlined here: Disable browser cache for entire ASP.NET website

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I did that, no change, however I noted that somehow the non mobile version prevails, as soon as I load a non mobile version of a page, whatever the browser/computer/phone, it's all going to be rendered as a non desktop.
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If you are speaking to static types such as images and such you can add this to your web.config

 <staticContent> <clientCache cacheControlMode="DisableCache"/> </staticContent>

Update:

Here is a link

This link talks in detail about what you want to do.

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I do want static content caching, the problem is caching the dynamic pages.
I added to my answer on how to tackle dynamic content caching
Thanks, that's what I was also reading but that did not seem to be enough.
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I think you are dealing with browser cache. Have you profiled the traffic to see the 304s? You may be chasing the wrong problem.

NOTE: Your cache busting solution has to include the client side as well as the server-side.

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I have that problem when I use separate browsers, this excludes browser cache issues. (browser2 is mobile and gets the page from browser1 which is not mobile)
You need to monitor the HTTP responses to know what is happening. Looking visually at the pages on different devices isn't very reliable.
I'm trying to disable OutputCache as you suggested, unfortunately I don't know how to monitor the HTTP status code on my android, but I get 200s on the desktop.

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