Disable Caching question

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term srv

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Jun 10, 2015, 2:56:15 PM6/10/15
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Fiddler Web Debugger (v4.5.1.2), Windows 7 x64

I would like to know about the 'Disable Caching' option in Fiddler. Does Fiddler have its own cache? I am using Fiddler to test Firefox nightly builds and I regularly clear the Firefox cache but I want to know if there's a second cache. I did some searching I found these two comments which explain the caching

Disable Caching removes all conditional validation headers from requests and rewrites all responses to Cache-Control: no-cache.

After clearing the browser’s cache, go back to Fiddler and check the Rules > Performance > Disable Caching menu item. When this rule is enabled, Fiddler will remove all conditional validation headers from requests and all cache-directives from responses. Additionally, it will add a Pragma: no-cache request header and a Cache-Control: no-cache response header to help prevent cached copies from being used.

So as far as I can tell what's happening is 'Disable Caching' modifies the requests and responses to remove caching indicators. But what happens when 'Disable Caching' is not checked, does that imply Fiddler caches the server response somewhere so that it can be returned to the browser at some later time? Or in other words does Fiddler use some secondary caching like Windows' IE cache. Thanks

EricLaw

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Jun 10, 2015, 3:51:07 PM6/10/15
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Fiddler itself doesn't have any kind of request/response cache (except, arguably, the AutoResponder).

As documented, Fiddler's "Disable Caching" rule simply does what the text in blue says-- it sets up request and response headers to help prevent a client from caching a response and to prevent a server from returning a cached response. This rule's effectiveness is, of course, predicated upon Fiddler actually seeing the request. If you failed to clear the browser/client's cache first, for instance, a request could be loaded from the browser cache without the request ever being seen by Fiddler at all.

term srv

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Jun 10, 2015, 3:54:04 PM6/10/15
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Thanks I just wanted to be sure my testing isn't affected by a secondary cache when the 'Disable Caching' option isn't enabled.
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