When first landing on your website, a visitor’s browser needs to download the code that runs on your website, including the Kameleoon script. The page loading time is impacted by the length of this code, but also by the number of external resources to download (images, css, scripts…). Caching allows to reduce this loading time during the next visits: the code of the website and all static ressources are downloaded and put in the browser cache in order to improve performance.
Caching therefore has a very important advantage and improves the user experience. But there’s a downside: if Kameleoon’s script changes (for example, if you have launched a new experiment), old visitors who have already started their visit on your website (and already downloaded the previous version of our script) won’t see the new experiment yet.
To get around this problem, we added a flag in our script, Cache Expiration (TTL: Time-to-live), that asks a browser to take a new version of our script every 1,5 hour: our script embeds its own expiry date.
Note: Sometimes, even though we have a TTL in place, a browser can decide to not take into account that information (this is very often the case on mobile browsers as they want to optimise the performance). It depends on each browser policy.
