HTTP Headers - enabling caching and compression with the portal?

Question

Has anyone configured their web server (IIS or Apache) or use a commercial product to flawlessly cache and compress all content generated by the portal?
Compression and caching is critical for making our portal based applictions work for overseas users. It should be doable, just taking advantage of standard HTTP protocols, but implementing this a complex system like the portal is tricky, we seem to be generating different values in the HTTP Headers for the same types of files (such as CSS).
We are running Apache so can't take advantage of the built in compression capabilities of the .net portal. We are running the java vervion. 6.1 mp1, sql server 2000 (portal, search, collab, publisher, studio, analytics, custom .net and java portlets on remote server).
Basically our strategy is to compress all outgoing static and dynamic text content (html, CSS, javascript), and to cache all static files (CSS, javascript, images) for 6 months to a year depending on file type.
Here are some links on the subjects of caching and compression that I have compiled:
Caching & Compression info and tools
http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-httpcomp/
http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/HttpCompressionQnD.asp?df=100&forumid=322472&exp=0&select=1722189#xx1722189xx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http_compression
http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html
https://secure.xcache.com/Page.aspx?c=60&p=590
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000807.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/apache2_mod_deflate
http://www.ircache.net/cgi-bin/cacheability.py
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-http-caching/
http://betterexplained.com/articles/speed-up-your-javascript-load-time/
http://betterexplained.com/articles/speed-up-your-javascript-load-time/
http://www.rubyrobot.org/article/5-tips-for-faster-loading-web-sites
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/
http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
http://www.pipeboost.com/
http://www.schroepl.net/cgi-bin/http_trace.pl
http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
http://www.port80software.com/surveys/top1000compression/
http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020314.htm
http://www.devwebpro.com/devwebpro-39-20041117DevelopingYourSiteforPerformanceCompressionandOtherServerSideEnhancements.html
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/11/17/developing-your-site-for-performance-optimal-cache-control
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/effective-website-acceleration
http://nazish.blog.com/1007523/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/IE_Fiddler2.asp?frame=true
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/version.asp
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html
http://www.web-caching.com/cacheability.html
http://www.edginet.org/techie/website/http.html
http://www.cmlenz.net/blog/2005/05/on_http_lastmod.html
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/cache/
http://www.webperformance.org/caching//caching_for_performance.html
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-debug-web-applications-with-firefox/
Edited by tkoenings at 06/18/2007 6:26 AM

Answer 1

Hi Scott,
Does Weblogic platform 8.1 supports netscape? We have developed a portal which
works perfectly on IE but it dies in netscape. Is netUI tags not supported in
Netscape?
Pls reply
manju
Scott Dunbar <[email protected]> wrote:
From a pure HTML perspective Portal does it's rendering with nested
tables.
Netscape 4.x and below have terrible performance with nested tables.
The
problem is not the Portal server but rather Netscape on the client machine.
If IE and/or a recent version of Netscape/Mozilla is not possible then
there are
really only two options:
1) Faster client hardware - not likely to be an acceptable solution.
2) Minimize the number of portlets and the complexity within the portlets.
Neither of these solutions are a great answer, but the 4.7 series of
Netscape is
getting pretty old. Having said that, we've got customers who want to
continue
to use IE 4 :)
Again, though, this problem is, I'm afraid out of our hands. It is the
client
rendering time that is the issue.
cg wrote:
Does anyone know of any known reasons why the 7.0 (did it also with4.0) portal
pages can take up to almost 30 seconds to load in Netscape 4.7? I knowit is a
very generic question but our customer still uses 4.7 and will notuse the portal
b/c it takes so long to load some of the webapps. What the pages willdo when
loading is that the headers will come up and when it gets to the bodyof the page
it seems to stall and then comes up all of a sudden. For some of thepages it
takes 6 seconds and for others it takes about 24-27 seconds.
We have suggested using IE only but that is not an option with allof the customers
and getting a newer version of Netscape is also out of the question.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.--
scott dunbar
bea systems, inc.
boulder, co, usa