Enable caching in tomcat 6

In previous tutorial we learnt how to enable caching in tomcat 7. In this tutorial we will learn how to enable caching in tomcat 6. Tomcat 6 doesn't comes with inbuilt ExpiresFilters like in tomcat 7, but we can write our own filter to achieve caching. Two headers "Cache-control" and "Expires" are needed to be set so that browser can determine when to load resource from server or cache.

Enable caching in tomcat 7

Caching is technique of storing files for future use. In we take it in context of website performance, caching helps browser to store different resources from server in local storage. Whenever a user request for resource browser first checks it cache and if it is available the resource is served from cache. This reduces network bandwidth and increases performance of your website. ( how to speed up your website ) 

Enable gzip compression in apache

When a user types your website url in browser and hits enter, browser sends request to server. Server responds to that request in the form of reply by giving back the requested document. That document can be of any size, typically if we take javascript files, it can be between 100 to 200 KB. Is there is any way to reduce this size so that the downloading can be faster ? Answer is "yes", that's what gzip compression does. It compresses the document size to almost 70% of the original. The major benefit of gzip compression is that it reduces bandwith by reducing the size of the response from the server.

How to speed up your website

One of the major concern of today's web developers is how to speed up their website. No one wants to wait for page download neither your user's too. Having fast website is very crucial in today's world, their is no place for slower websites. Below are some tips that you can follow to make your website blazing fast with minimal network load and fast rendering.