Bug 5030: Negative responses are never cached (#566)
Negative caching was blocked by checkCachable().
Since
3e98df2, Squid cached ENTRY_NEGCACHED entries in memory cache
only. Back then, storeCheckSwapable() prevented what later became
ENTRY_NEGCACHED entries from going to disk. The design was obscured by
8350fe9 that renamed storeCheckSwapable() to storeCheckCachable().
Commit
97754f5 violated that (obscured) design by adding a
checkCachable() call to StoreEntry::memoryCachable(), effectively
blocking ENTRY_NEGCACHED entries from the memory cache as well. That
call should have been added, but checkCachable() should not have denied
caching rights to ENTRY_NEGCACHED -- the corresponding check should have
been moved into StoreEntry::mayStartSwapOut().
By removing ENTRY_NEGCACHED from checkCachable(), we now allow
ENTRY_NEGCACHED entries into both memory and disk caches, subject to all
the other checks. We allow ENTRY_NEGCACHED to be cached on disk because
negative responses are fundamentally no different than positive ones:
HTTP allows caching of 4xx and 5xx responses expiring in the future.
Hopefully, the increased disk cache traffic will not be a problem.