Tomcat – HTTP gzip compression not working for css or javascript in tomcat 6

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).

you were heading in the right direction. in tomcat 5.5 connectionTimeout is the same as keepalivetimeout in tomcat 6.0. but you should change the value from 2 to 2000, as the tomcat value is in milliseconds and the apache value is in seconds.

you are right as you don't see the timeout value in the http headers send by your tomcat. but the timeout will take action on the server side. i asume it is not send as the tomcat connector is HTTP/1.1 and the Kee-Alive: timeout=X, max=Y is HTTP/1.0. as the tomcat documentation tells, you should synchronize the timeout values on both sides, loadbalancer and tomcat in your case.