There are two important HTTP Cache-Control extensions for stale content coming:
stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error. They are actually already being
adopted by Fastly and Chrome.
When cache expires, user can be served stale content while the latest version is being re-fetched in the background. It makes user never wait for content re-generation, so he usually gets content immediately from cache.
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, stale-while-revalidate=7200
Content is cached for 1 hour, but up to 2 hours it’s allowed to serve stale content if the latest version is not fetched yet.
Exact behaviour is explained in proposed standard.
When cache expires, user can be served stale content when web site is down. Even if you’re not fond of serving stale content, it’s always better than broken page, isn’t it? It makes your website more fault tolerant.
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, stale-while-revalidate=7200, stale-if-error=86400
Content is cached for 1 hour, but up to 24 hours it’s allowed to serve stale content if web site is down or page is broken.
Exact behaviour is explained in proposed standard.