web cached sites

Hello Marvin,

Many thanks for reaching out to Sophos Community and hope you are well.

Was this previously working fine before? or Is this always the case whenever the students access the said website? or there are only times that this happens?

Web Caching works in very limited scenarios and is actually fairly complicated.

Caching depends on certain things 
1) the server says the page is allowed to be cached
2) the browser requests a cached version
3) and the browser is not doing any caching on its own

Most single-user scenarios that the browser and server allow caching, the browser does the caching for you so the proxy's cache never comes into play.

Here is a test:

Create a bookmark for www.example.com.> Use the bookmark to load the page.> Use the bookmark to load the page again.

Note that in the proxy log there is no second request because it was cached by the browser.

Now hit F5 to reload www.example.com.

Note that in the proxy log there is now another request but it was not from cache. The status code is 304. In this the browser said "GET this page, by the way I have cached version x" and the website replied 304 Not Modified with no content saying the browser cache was good. The proxy does not interfere.

Now clear the browser cache then use the bookmark to load the page. You should see the request in the log and it should come from the cache.

Source info:

 Web caching not working 

To view the cache message values displayed in http.log: https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KB-000034917?language=en_US

Additionally, I may also recommend you to check the status of the AP where the students connect on the said time of access and check if there's any congestion happening. There is also a possiblility that the sluggishness might happen on the network level (AP)

Many thanks for your time and patience and thank you for choosing Sophos

Cheers,

Raphael,

Thanks for the info. You've given me a lot to work on here. Much appreciated.

I hate to reveal my ignorance, but where do I find 'the proxy log'? I've done a bunch of hunting and trying to figure out what exactly I'm looking for but don't quite see it. (Turns out our cache wasn't turned on... if that makes a difference if I was looking for something that was invisible until the proxy is turned on.)

Marvin

Hello there,

it's under http.log https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KB-000036784?language=en_US

you can run this command in advance shell, to view later parts of the log file tail -f /var/log/http.log 

Cheers,