Thread: Refresh Issue

I'm getting a strange issue in that if I make small changes to a javascript or css file the changes will not show immediately.

I've tried clearing the browser cache and clearing the site cache (which we don't have turned on anyway) to no avail. It does not do this constantly but when it decides to do this I have to just wait it out for a period of time.

By the way, when it is doing this I can delete the file in question on the server and it is still getting loaded even after clearing out caches.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

The only times I've run into this issue is with caching in the Admin site. Toggling caching on/off and then resetting the cache can help to force the changes to go through. If you're not caching anything in admin, you might look at IIS. Have you tried restarting the IIS service? Obviously this isn't ideal in a production environment, but if you can do this on a staging server it might help you to narrow down the issue. It might be the application pool, or .Net cache that's keeping your changes from showing.

which browser are you using ?

try opening a diferent browser to view when you make the changes....just to start a new session/cache

No, switching browsers doesn't work. Occasionally it has but not reliably. If I update the js file, reload the page it doesn't show the changes, look at the source of the page to click on the js link to get there, it shows old code and if I refresh the js file in the browser it then shows the new code. But for some reason the old version is being served to the browser in context of the page.

are you sure you are resetting the cache in the backend ?

top right(ish) when you login to admin

Yes. (just more text for the minimum ten characters)

Shot in the dark here...my vote is with IIS caching on the server itself, but I wonder if the files aren't updating on the server like you think they are. On the rare occasion if I'm troubleshooting something on a live site, I'll use Filezilla to modify files directly on the server. When I click save and close, Filezilla prompts me to make sure I want to save the changes, and sometimes I'll forget to say yes, and I'll go and refresh the page, wondering where my changes are. I'm not assuming you're as absent minded as me, but I thought I'd check just to see if that might be it. When you refresh your browser and see the old code, do you go back to the server to make sure the new code is truly there?

I just re-read your note about deleting the file and it's still showing in the browser so I think caching has to be the issue. Is your site configured to use both an IP address and a domain in the host headers and are you also using IIS6? If so, this might have something to do with it, I'd remove one or the other and see if that helps. If that doesn't work, you should try disabling caching for files that you know are going to change frequently: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247404

At this point I'm agreeing that this doesn't seem to be just limited to our aspdotnetstorefront websites. Although, I've only seen it one case outside that environment but I think that's enough to rule it out.