Magento and Apache - Cache settings seem to be ign

Question

I'm running an instance of Magento and I'm trying to set the caching rules for the content that is not going to change often. I added the rules I wanted to the .htaccess file (rules are at the bottom of the post) which is located in Magento root folder, but they seem to be ignored. When I check the http headers, this is what I see:

Pragma: no-cache, no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform

Obviously, I'm doing something wrong here. Is there anything I should check to see who is forcing a "no-cache" policy, and where? Thanks in advance for the answers.

Rules added to .htaccess file

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">
    ExpiresDefault A29030400
    Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

# Set up caching on media files for 2 weeks
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">
    ExpiresDefault A1209600
    Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

# Set up 1 week caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt|html|js|css)$">
    ExpiresDefault A604800
    Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# Force no caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch "\.(php|cgi|pl|htm)$">
    ExpiresActive Off
    Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
    Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

Answer 1

You did know there is a htaccess in /media? (Faceplant...)

If you are doing this then you may want to consider putting the 'static' content on a separate sub domain, one that is cookie free.

In the backend of Magento go to system->config->general->web and enter http://static.yourdomain.com/

Now you can move the .htaccess directives into your original httpd.conf file (this is notionally quicker) and remove/park the .htaccess file.

Now set the cookie domain (in 'Session Cookie Management') to www.yourdomain.com - now there won't be any cookies on static.yourdomain.com so the web server should be snappier. If those images are not coming through then you may need to setup a wildcard on your DNS 'A' record so that any non-www address goes through to the same box.

You can now fine-tune the .htaccess file in /media and put those directives in the static.yourdomain.com.conf