One approach to minimising redundant transmission of data is the use of Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers as defined in HTTP/1.1.

In this scheme, each object returned by the webserver carries a date of last modification (a.k.a. "validator"). A user agent or proxy cache can store this value and, upon the next reload of the same object, issue a conditional GET query with the Last-Modified-Since header set. The webserver will then use this header to decide whether the client's copy of the object is still "fresh" (as recent as the data on the server) or "stale" (older than the data on the server). If it is fresh, there is no need to send the object again, so the server responds with a brief "304 Not Modified" message instead.

Modern webservers and user agents (e.g., Apache/1.3, Netscape Navigator 4.x and above, Internet Explorer) fully support this technique. Apache automatically handles If-Modified-Since requests for all static objects by default.

In the case of dynamic content as generated by PHP, we have to take care of these things manually. We need to return a meaningful Last-Modified header and handle If-Modified-Since requests so that the user agent gets fresh data if and only if necessary. For Phorum, this means that we have to keep track of database updates. If the database has not changed since the client's last request, we can simply return 304 without bothering the DBMS at all.