[Support Guide] How does Netlify’s CDN handle caching files?

[wobedi]

Hi fool,

I am using a bundler that automatically appends a content hash as a suffix to all my JS and CSS files. This means that:

1. The file name changes if the file content changes
2. The file name DOESN’T change if the file content remains the same.

Now, from what I understand the default Netlify behavior is:

1. Client checks with Netlify for each file if content changed (done via etag and optimized via HTTP2, but nonetheless a network roundtrip)
2. If file content is unchanged client takes it from cache, otherwise it fetches updated version from Netlify

The relevant cache config AFAIK is max-age=0. Now, I am tempted to change the max-age for my CSS and JS files to something very high, like 604800 or even higher.
I don’t see any downside to this, as my file-content-aware fingerprinting (done by my bundler) should take care of cache invalidation.

Am I missing anything here?

UPDATE: I have now realized that I have asked this exact same question before

Caching headers for prefetched assets

You can modify headers for any file that isn’t asset-optimized (since those have the special handling, but also potentially create CORS problems since they are served from a different domain). You do this using our custom headers functionality: For those two, you might use this in your separate headers file, or your toml file though that configuration being more verbose I don’t include it here: /path/to/therapist.js: cache-control: public, max-age=31556926 /path/to/session.js cache-co…

Thank you for your extensive answer there. Overall, I am still thinking that increasing the max-age for JS and CSS makes sense for me, because cache busting is taken care of by content-aware fingerprinting of my bundler.