How to detect when XHR returns a cached resource?

Question

I'm wondering if there is a way how to detect when a response is returned from a local cache? Is it possible?

The solution should be general and work for unconditional requests. In this case, the response code is always 200 OK, but XHR returns a cached resource for the second request (e.g. the first response contains Expires header, so there is no need to ask a server for a new resource before the expiration date).

Answer 1

The answer is Date header

• If date header is before send date then a response is coming from a cache.
• If date header is after date when a request was sent then a response is fresh.

e.g.

• from cache: request was sent at 11:00, response date is 10:59
• no cache: request was sent at 11:00, response date is 11:01

Answer 2

Check to see if the status code returned is 304 (not modified) in the onreadystatechange function. Something along the lines of:

xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
{
  if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==304)
    {
      alert("Cached");
    }
} 

Answer 3

Apparently we can also use the Resource Timing API to determine whether something was served from browser cache; if the transferSize is 0 (and the encodedBodySize is >0) then that's a cache hit.

That seems like a better solution than the others, as long as you're dealing with a browser that supports it.

Ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PerformanceResourceTiming/transferSize