Stale content does not seem to work

Network Services
1

We are testing fastly on the free tier and one of our tests relates to stale content.

So I tried these steps:

  • Enable the “Serve stale content on origin failure” option
  • Visit the website and some webpages under it
  • Check with “Check cache” option if the content is cached (it is).
  • Stop the web service on the backend
  • Try to server the cached content while the backend service is off

I would expect the cached (stale) content to be served but I get this instead:

Error 503 Backend unavailable, connection timeout

Backend unavailable, connection timeout

Error 54113

Details: cache-toj-letoxxxxxxx-TOJ dddddddddd dddddddddd

Varnish cache server

I also tried the custom VCL in the documentation:

Am i doing something wrong?

2

How long have you configured the initial TTL for the object you’re testing? For serving stale content to work properly, you need an initial TTL of over 3700 seconds.

3

We are talking about the beresp.ttl setting right? The example in the docs had that set to 3600s. I set that to 7200s but still the same.

4

@theo In that case, it may be time to take this to our support team for diagnostics around the specific object. support.fastly.com is where you can file a ticket, and feel free to link to this thread.