Caching

Pathling implements ETag-based cache validation, which enables clients to skip processing of queries when the underlying data has not changed.

To use ETags, simply take the content of the ETag header that is returned with a Pathling response. You can then accompany a subsequent request with the If-None-Match, using the previously received ETag as the value. If the result of the query would not have changed, Pathling will respond with 304 Not Modified, and will skip re-processing of the query.

Web browsers already implement this behaviour, and if your application runs in the browser you will get the benefits without any extra implementation effort.

The current limitation of this implementation within Pathling is that caching is done over the entire database, not scoped to individual resource types. This means that updates to any resource will invalidate the cache for the entire database.

Cache keys persist across restarts of the server, as they are derived from state that is persisted along with the data.