Improve performance by adding expire headers on images supplied by ImageVault

Because all images in ImageVault is served with an http handler it's not possible to configure expire headers the normal way by configuring the cache control for static content.

With this post I intend to show how easy it is to boost your performance by adding expire headers and make all images stored in ImageVault cacheable. Open up web.config and navigate the configuration section for ImageVault and add ImagesExpiresInMinutes, the value must be just over three days to be considered as a far future date so the minimum value is 4321 minutes.

One small drawback when expire headers is added to ImageVault images is that the function to replace the original does not work because the images are cached by the client and path is the same even though you changed the image, the image will thus be replaced when the cache is released and the client requests the image again. According to me the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but you certainly should notify the editors about this change.