Caching

Processing and encoding can be an expensive operation. The first time we visit the url, the image is processed, and there might be a short delay and getting the response.

However, dragonfly apps send Cache-Control and ETag headers in the response, so we can easily put a caching proxy like Varnish, Squid, Rack::Cache, etc. in front of the app, so that subsequent requests are served super-quickly straight out of the cache.

The file 'dragonfly/rails/images' puts Rack::Cache in front of Dragonfly by default, but for better performance you may wish to look into something like Varnish.

Given a dragonfly app

app = Dragonfly[:images]

You can configure the 'Cache-Control' header with

app.cache_duration = 3600*24*365*3  # time in seconds

For a well-written discussion of Cache-Control and ETag headers, see http://tomayko.com/writings/things-caches-do.