How does adding a random number to the end of an A

Question

How exactly does adding a random number to the end of an AJAX server call prevent the database server or browser (not entirely sure which one is intended) from caching? why does this work?

Answer 1

It's to prevent your browser (and to a reasonable amount, a web proxy) from caching requests. Typically, a query parameter - like ?rand2024= tells the browser/proxy to send the onward request with a parameter telling your application to behave differently. That's why such requests are useful to bust caches.

Answer 2

It is intended to prevent client-side (or reverse proxy) caching.

Since the cache will be keyed on the exact request, by adding a random element to the request, the exact request URL should never be seen twice; so it won't be used more than once, and an intelligent cache won't bother keeping around something that's never been seen more than once, at least, not for long.

Answer 3

Your browser caches the web page keyed by the exact text of the URL, so adding a random-number parameter ensures that the URL is different every time - thus no real caching. Your browser doesn't know that the server is (hopefully) ignoring this parameter.