Tomcat – Compression of Tomcat mod_jk results in Apache httpd

apache-2.2compressionmod-jkservlettomcat

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:

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)
How do I enable Apache httpd-compression for mod_jk results (perhaps
from JBoss and not Tomcat)?
Perhaps related: How do I modify caching headers from mod_jk results
in Apache httpd?

Thank you!

Best Answer

Blama,

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

Here are my thoughts:

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.
mod_deflate for apache or nginx ngx_http_gzip_module
You can handle all the caching rules in tomcat or apache. It depends on what rules you want.

Related Solutions

Windows – Content Encoding Error when trying to use GZip on Apache

The first issue is that you have the element with a directory from the file system...

This is from the Apache manual:

When to use <Location>. Use <Location> to apply directives to content that lives outside the filesystem. For content that lives in the filesystem, use <Directory> and <Files>. An exception is <Location />, which is an easy way to apply a configuration to the entire server.

When I setup mod_deflate on Apache I use this setup:

# --------------------------------------------------------
# Deflate Module Configuration
# --------------------------------------------------------
<IfModule deflate_module>
  # Set the location to webservers root
  <Location />
    # Insert the filters
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

    # Netscape 4.x has some problems
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
    # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

    # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
    Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

    # Make sure to never zip binaries (ie6 and chrome has issues with this.)
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
  </Location>

    # Enable mod_deflate logging by uncommenting these lines
    #DeflateFilterNote Input instream
    #DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
    #DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio

    #LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
    #CustomLog logs/deflate_log deflate 
</IfModule>

Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Probably the ProxyPass / directive you have in your config routes all requests to the Tomcat backend, bypassing all your mod_rewrite directives. You can try to remove the ProxyPass directive and use RewriteRule with the [P] flag after your other rewrites:

mod_rewrite: P|proxy

For the expire headers the situation is worse — in another similar question a solution was not found.

Option +FollowSymLinks would be needed for using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files; in your case it is not required, because you can put everything in the Apache config. Moving rules from config to .htaccess is pointless and can only make things slower. However, there is an important difference between .htaccess and the Apache config — in .htaccess patterns in RewriteRule are matched against relative filesystem paths (which never start with /), while in the VirtualHost context these patterns are matched against the URL path after the hostname, which always starts with /. Therefore at least one of your rules is incorrect:

RewriteRule ^content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

should be

RewriteRule ^/content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

(note the additional slash in the beginning).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Content Encoding Error when trying to use GZip on Apache

Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Related Topic