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I'm developing a web application locally on my system, serving it using Tomcat (tomcat-7.0.52). In production, I want to front the Tomcat with an Apache httpd (Apache/2.2.15).

This works and I managed to configure caching as needed. Now I want to configure compression, but it seems that a can't get Apache httpd to modify the response it got from Tomcat.

But as I read here, this is the preferred way of doing to. mod_jk compression is only between httpd and Tomcat and if I want to configure compression directly in Tomcat, I'd need an extra servlet for it.

I have the following line in my vhost-file to enable compression of static and httpd-served content:

 #SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html application/json text/xml text/css text/javascript

Enabling the 1st line didn't change anything for me.

I pass these requests to Tomcat using mod_jk:

<IfModule mod_jk.c>
 JkMount /myapp/j_security_check worker1
 JkMount /myapp/*.jsp worker1
 JkMount /myapp/DataSourceLoader worker1
 JkMount /myapp/ServletLogin worker1
</IfModule>

Using Firebug I can see that the mime-type of the Tomcat-returned requests is 

/myapp/j_security_check: "text/plain; charset=UTF-8" (with the space)
/myapp/*.jsp: "text/plain; charset=UTF-8" (with the space)
/myapp/DataSourceLoader: "application/json;charset=UTF-8"  (without space)

Because of the spaces I can't add to AddOutputFilterByType and as I also have the mime-types without the UTF-8 and I also tried with just SetOutputFilter, I think that these directives do not manipulate the Tomcat answer at all.

So my questions are:

  1. What's the best suggested solution? Tomcat compression or Apache httpd compression? (According to gzip compression using mod_deflate apache with tomcat (which redirects here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16653642/tomcat-7-gzip-compression-not-working) it should be done in httpd)

  2. How do I enable Apache httpd-compression for mod_jk results (perhaps from JBoss and not Tomcat)?

  3. Perhaps related: How do I modify caching headers from mod_jk results in Apache httpd?

Thank you!

Community
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Blama
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1 Answers1

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Blama,

I agree with #1 in that compression can be handled with apache or another web server.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. I use apache mod_proxy or nginx in front of tomcat. This allows me to handle SSL, compression and static content if needed. I have started to move to nginx to replace apache on the front end.
  2. mod_deflate for apache or nginx ngx_http_gzip_module
  3. You can handle all the caching rules in tomcat or apache. It depends on what rules you want.
Ray Hunter
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