Just out of curiosity does NSURLCache just completely ignore the max-age cache control header on 304 responses? I have a system setup using etags and max-age, that in theory should only send a request to the web service every 10 seconds based on the max-age setting in the header. Now this works when iOS gets the 200 response on initial load, but not when it receives the 304 response, it just continues to make the request to the server despite the max-age value. Based on what I've read in the past, what I'm trying to do is COMPLETELY valid http to ease server resources.
Sometimes I dislike the magic in the background.