RECIPE / CACHING

ETag and Conditional GET

Cut bandwidth and latency by letting clients ask “has anything changed?” instead of redownloading the full payload. Meridian endpoints support strong ETags and the If-None-Match header for cheap revalidation against the model catalog, billing snapshots, and image listings.

01.How ETags work

On every 200 OK, Meridian returns an ETag header containing a hex digest of the response body. Clients store the value and replay it on the next request as If-None-Match. If the resource has not changed, the server responds 304 Not Modified with an empty body.

02.Example exchange

# First request
GET /v1/models HTTP/1.1
Host: llm.getnimbus.net
Authorization: Bearer sk-nimbus-...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
ETag: "9b2c4f1a7e3d"
Cache-Control: private, max-age=60
Content-Type: application/json

# Revalidation
GET /v1/models HTTP/1.1
Host: llm.getnimbus.net
Authorization: Bearer sk-nimbus-...
If-None-Match: "9b2c4f1a7e3d"

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
ETag: "9b2c4f1a7e3d"

03.When to use it

•Polling the model catalog from a dashboard sidebar.
•Pulling billing snapshots into a customer admin tool.
•Refreshing generated image lists between renders without rehydrating thumbnails.