Response caching policies define how long API Center stores API responses in the cache. You can reduce redundant backend load by creating response caching policies for operations.
When response caching is enabled for an operation, API Center saves responses to invocations of the operation in the cache repository. When API consumers access the operation, API Center attempts to use saved responses in order to reduce time and resources. If a matching response is found in the cache, API Center returns the response from the cache.
API Center deletes responses from the cache after the defined timeout. When you disable the response caching policy for an operation, API Center deletes responses from the cache for the operation.
You can configure a maximum timeout of 3,600 seconds.
The API References area of a response caching policy displays all the designed APIs that use the policy.
When you run a managed API endpoint that has response caching configured, the response caching doesn't work if the upstream API response is in compressed format. The Accept-Encoding request header typically contains a comma-separated list of encoding formats, such as gzip, br, and deflate. The Accept-Encoding request header is added by default in Postman or web browser. To resolve the issue of honoring the response caching, use Postman to disable the Accept-Encoding header in your request, and then invoke the API. However, if you invoke the API from a web browser, Accept-Encoding is added automatically. As a result, the response caching policy might not be honored.