cache expiration question

hi. i want to use squid as an accelerator to house mostly gifs that are
refreshed daily. the strategy is to change the name (url) of the gifs
whenever they change to cause squid to refresh from the origin server
when need be. simple so far.

however, sometimes the gifs change during the day and there is no change
in the url. so, i was wondering if there were 'directives' or some sort
of technique by which the orgin server can tell squid that it should
revalidate itself for subsequent request of images that change.

thanks to all ! i am somewhat new to 'caching' and am trying to figure
out if squid can meet the requirements my site has.

oh, one more thing. does squid remove stale objects after they have
expired and there is no need for them to take up cache space anymore ?

doug
Received on Sat Aug 16 1997 - 23:52:51 MDT