I have set a page rule “cache everything” on my site and set edge TTL to 1 day.
In my understanding, every request should be cached in the edge server. Within the TTL period, the next request with the same URL will be served from the edge server and will not reach my origin server. For example, “example.com” is visited just now. In the next 24 hours, the edge server will serve all the “example.com” visits.
By enabling these settings, bandwidth and number of requests should be reduced for the origin server. However, it didn’t.
I notice everything is still going to my server, even the request is cached in the edge server. I checked the cf-cache-status header which said it is a hit, but I can still see this request in the server logs. And many requests have a strange query string, eg. “Example Domain”
My questions are, have I misinterpreted the use of Cache Everything? Why is it not reducing the number of requests to my server? What is the meaning of “_=” as the query string and why is it in the request?