Fast HEAD requests?

[nattaylor]

Hi, I recently implemented HEAD requests to check if a cached resource is expired, but discovered that such requests can take 10+ seconds.

What is the recommended approach to caching? Should I plan to keep track of the max-age on within my application? I suppose if the max-age never (or infrequently) changes for an endpoint, then I can just hardcode the value.

So I guess this is a feature request... to make HEAD requests respond quickly.

Here is a look at the logs with some timings for a few endpoints.

[03-Feb-2021 13:05:40 UTC] Loading Weather......................................
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:40 America/New_York] Retrieving https://api.weather.gov/points/42.3755,-71.0368.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:40 America/New_York] Exist in cache.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:41 America/New_York] HEAD took 0.127653s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:41 America/New_York] Cached resource is valid.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:41 America/New_York] Retrieving https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/BOX/71,77/forecast.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:41 America/New_York] Exist in cache.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:51 America/New_York] HEAD took 9.949158s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:05:51 America/New_York] Requesting from server.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:04 America/New_York] Resource retrieved in 13.922203s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:04 America/New_York] Retrieving https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/BOX/71,77/forecast/hourly.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:04 America/New_York] Exist in cache.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:19 America/New_York] HEAD took 14.124384s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:19 America/New_York] Requesting from server.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Resource retrieved in 9.670928s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Retrieving https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/BOX/71,77/stations.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Exist in cache.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] HEAD took 0.083157s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Cached resource is valid.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Retrieving https://api.weather.gov/stations/KBOS/observations/latest.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Exist in cache.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] HEAD took 0.09773s.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:28 America/New_York] Requesting from server.
[03-Feb-2021 08:06:29 America/New_York] Resource retrieved in 0.092261s.