stale-while-revalidate serves an expired response instantly and refreshes it in the background
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:53:17.472Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:53:17.472Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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Cache-Control: max-age=60, stale-while-revalidate=600, defined in RFC 5861, lets a cache return a response that expired up to ten minutes ago while it fetches a fresh copy out of band. The requesting client gets a cache hit with no added latency and the next request gets the refreshed body. It is the cheapest way to remove revalidation latency from a hot path without greatly extending the window in which users see stale content.
stale-if-error is the companion: it permits serving stale content for a stated period when the origin returns a 5xx or is unreachable, turning a brief outage into slightly old content rather than an error page. Support differs between browsers and CDNs, so verify what your edge actually implements. Neither directive helps the first request after a deploy, since nothing stale exists yet for a newly introduced URL.
Source: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5861.html
http-cachinghttpperformance
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