Topic: Problem using mod_deflate with proxy

[john_speedway2]

Is anyone succesfully able to compress HTML pages while using mod_proxy_ajp to forward requests to Tomcat 6?

I've tried using several configurations but the web page is always returned uncompressed.

Here's my current Apache 2.2.6 config ...

<VirtualHost *:8080>
DocumentRoot /www/docs/mywebsite.com
ServerName www.mywebsite.com

<Proxy balancer://mywebsite_cluster>
BalancerMember ajp://www.mywebsite.com:8009 min=10 max=100 route=node01 loadfactor=1
</Proxy>

<Location / >
ProxyPass balancer://mywebsite_cluster/ stickysession=JSESSIONID lbmethod=byrequests nofailover=off
ProxyPassReverse balancer://mywebsite_cluster/

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Location>
</VirtualHost>

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
John

[tdonovan]

I had no trouble getting compressed pages with your setup using Apache 2.2.6 on Windows with Tomcat 6.0.14.

A couple of things (which you may already know):

* Comment out the <Connector> for port 8080 in Tomcat's server.xml if Tomcat runs on the same machine as Apache.

* Enable listening to port 8080 in Apache with Listen 8080, so the request goes through Apache and not directly to Tomcat.
Put this Listen directive outside the <VirtualHost> block.

* Make sure the request you are testing with is HTTP 1.1 and has an Accept-Encoding header which allows gzip compression

Here's a request and its 113-byte response which shows compression (using netcat to port 8080):

[john_speedway2]

Thank you Tom! I've modifed the config file and it works!!

NameVirtualHost *:8080
<VirtualHost *:8080>
DocumentRoot /www/docs/mywebsite
ServerName local.mywebsite.com

<Proxy balancer://mywebsite_cluster>
BalancerMember ajp://local.mywebsite.com:8009 min=10 max=100 route=node01 loadfactor=1
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / balancer://mywebsite_cluster/ stickysession=JSESSIONID lbmethod=byrequests nofailover=off
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mywebsite_cluster/

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
</VirtualHost>


Here are the HTTP headers as viewed with Firefox-LiveHttpHeaders.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: local.mywebsite.com:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:15:01 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Path=/
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked


Thanks so much for your help!

-John