Always Online functionality and cache clearing. How do they work together?

What is the name of the domain?

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What is the issue you’re encountering

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What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

Hello everyone, I have a question and hope you can clarify it for me. On Cloudflare, there’s a fantastic statistic that shows how much of the entire site is cached. In my case, it’s around 98%-99%.

What I’m wondering is what happens when I clear the entire cache, and how this is influenced by the Always Online mode I have enabled.

If I’ve understood correctly, when a user requests a resource, the cached version is always provided (thanks to Always Online). But as soon as Cloudflare realises (at the same time as the request) that the resource has been updated or changed, it retrieves it from the origin server and serves it to the user. Is that correct?

I’m asking because even though I’ve cleared the entire cache before, the percentage of cached files remains roughly the same. For example, I don’t see it drop from 98% to 0% and then gradually refill. Hence my question.

Thanks to anyone who can provide insight!

Always online is only served when your website is offline and a cached version is not available to be served.

Cloudflare’s Always Online feature is now integrated with the Internet Archive :arrow_upper_right: so that visitors can access a portion of your website even when your origin server is unreachable and a Cloudflare-cached version is unavailable.

You can read more on this here:

Which purge are you using?
You can follow instructions on purge everything:

Thank you. Someone explained a bit more to me via Reddit. So okay, everything is clear now.

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