Forcing Stale Content out of the Cache
If you update part of the content for your load-balanced Web site, the Virtual Traffic Manager only picks up the new content when the existing cached versions expire.
You can manually force the Virtual Traffic Manager to expire content from the cache, so that it retrieves the updated versions next time a client requests the content, or you can do so programmatically.
Manual Removal of Cached Content
To manually remove cached content, perform the following steps:
- Click Activity > Content Cache to view a selection of the files that are currently cached by your Virtual Traffic Manager cluster.
- If necessary, use the Display Cache Items selector to locate the items you want to expire, specifying host header matches and path matches to narrow the selection down.
- Select the entries you want to expire and click Clear Selected.
This immediately invalidates cached copies of these resources, and forces the Virtual Traffic Manager to retrieve new versions the next time a client requests them.
Programmatic Removal of Cached Content
The Virtual Traffic Manager Control API includes SOAP methods to inspect and invalidate entries in the cache; these methods are located in the System.Cache interface.
A content provisioning system that uploads new content to Web servers could also potentially invoke a script that used the Virtual Traffic Manager Control API to invalidate any updated items from the content cache.
For more information, see the Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide.