This week in caching: hard purge vs soft purge
A distinction that decides whether a purge causes a traffic spike on your origin:
— Hard purge: the object is deleted from cache instantly. Next request is a guaranteed miss → origin fetch. Purge a popular URL during peak and you've just shipped a mini load test to your backend.
— Soft purge: the object is marked stale, not removed. Next request serves it stale-while-revalidate and refreshes in the background — no latency cliff, no origin stampede.
— When you still want hard: legal/PII takedowns, or anything where serving stale even for a second is unacceptable.
Default to soft purge for content updates; reserve hard purge for 'this must vanish now'.
Bookmark: Fastly's soft-purge documentation — the canonical writeup of why stale-marking beats deletion for routine invalidation.
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This week in caching: hard purge vs soft purge
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