So, while you are wondering who will answer your next support call and/or
watching your stock tank, here's something that I have been experimenting with:
web compression. It's built into most browsers and web servers, and by default
it's turned off. Turning it on can really make a big difference over longer,
slower network connections.
Here's what I have learned so far, and I'd really like to know if this results
in any improved web performance at other sites. If you try this please report
your results (but trim all this text out to keep the clutter down)...
Turning on compression in the web-server used for Remedy mid-tier has produced
a dramatic speedup at our site. I'm really not sure why this isn't a
recommended configuration, except that the compression will consume some
horsepower on the web server and decompression will use a few cycles on the end
user desktop. If your end-to-end times across the network are more than a
couple of seconds, it's probably worth testing at your site.
Here are the steps to follow for Apache/tomcat 5.5.xx on Solaris. These should
also work for Apache/tomcat on Linux and HP and AIX, but I haven't tested these
other platforms. There's a link to instructions for Windows IIS at the bottom.
"tomcat" in a directory or path name refers to the installation directory for
Apache/tomcat. On my system this is /opt/ar/apache-tomcat-5.5.20, and we've
aliased that to just /opt/ar/tomcat.
First, on your Apache/tomcat server, locate tomcat/conf/server.xml. This
configuration file has a stanza for each of the connectors your web server is
running, and you'll find one defined for port 8443, 8080, etc. Incidentally,
you can change those to port 443 (secure) or port 80 and get rid of the 8080 on
your URL, or you can just duplicate the 8080 stanza, changing the port number
to just 80, and it will work either way, assuming that you don't have anything
else running on port 80.
Find this text in tomcat/conf/server.xml:
<!-- Note : To use gzip compression you could set the following properties :
compression="on"
compressionMinSize="2048"
noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata"
compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml"
And add it to each of the stanzas for a port, so they look like this:
<!-- Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
<Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true"
compression="on" compressionMinSize="2048"
noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata"
compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml"/>
There will probably be several stanzas, and I don't see anything wrong with
turning compression on for all of them. The compressMinSize setting says that
you need at least 2k worth of data before it's worthwhile compressing it. You
can adjust this value if you think it's necessary, but leave it alone for now.
In most cases you'll just add the last three lines to an existing stanza. Be
careful about the /> at the end. You'll need to remove the /> on the last line
of the existing stanza and make sure it appears as the last thing in your new
stanza.
You could restart tomcat at this point on Windows and compression would start
working.
If you are on Unix/linux there's another step (and this I learned the hard way
with a lot of googling).
The Apache 5-5.x distributions truncate a bunch of filenames when they are
gunzipped on Unix hosts. The files are in
tomcat/webapps/servlets-examples/WEB-INF/classes/compressionFilters
and if they are broken they will look like this:
total 58
2 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Oct 2 11:41 .
2 drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 1024 Oct 2 15:21 ..
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7438 Sep 12 2006 CompressionFilter.
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1815 Sep 12 2006 CompressionFilterT
18 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8877 Sep 12 2006 CompressionRespons
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7920 Sep 12 2006 CompressionServlet
or perhaps like this:
total 66
2 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Jun 25 2007 .
2 drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 512 Jun 25 2007 ..
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4025 Sep 12 2006
CompressionFilter.class
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7440 Sep 12 2006
CompressionFilter.java
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1815 Sep 12 2006
CompressionFilterTestSe
18 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8879 Sep 12 2006
CompressionResponseStre
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7922 Sep 12 2006
CompressionServletRespo
They should look like this. Notice the longer file names:
total 88
2 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Oct 2 15:22 .
2 drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 1024 Oct 2 15:21 ..
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4025 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionFilter.class
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7626 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionFilter.java
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1665 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionFilterTestServlet.class
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1974 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionFilterTestServlet.java
10 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4354 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionResponseStream.class
20 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9318 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionResponseStream.java
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3838 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionServletResponseWrapper.class
14 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7114 Aug 28 22:10
CompressionServletResponseWrapper.java
To fix, go get the current apache/tomcat 5-5-xx distribution from the download
page at http://tomcat.apache.org, and unzip it on your Windows desktop. You
don't actually need to unzip the whole thing, just navigate to the
compressionFilters folder and extract these 8 files into another folder on your
desktop, then FTP them to your web server and put them into:
tomcat/webapps/servlets-examples/WEB-INF/classes/compressionFilters
It's probably a good idea to move the existing compressionFilters directory to
compressionFilters.original just in case. I don't know a lot about tomcat, but
I think you could put these in WEB-INF/classes under any app and they would
work. tomcat just has to be able to find them somewhere, and on my server the
jsp-examples and servelet-examples apps are still active.
THEN
go to tomcat/bin and run shutdown.sh, and then startup.sh
THEN
go to your desktop web browser and login to the Remedy page. You will probably
want to exercise recaching all the pages on 7.0.x or earlier.
THEN go tell your friends that it's working!
Turning on compression for IIS on Windows 2003 is discussed here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/d52ff289-94d3-4085-bc4e-24eb4f312e0e.mspx?mfr=true
I don't have an IIS setup at the moment, but it looks pretty straightforward.
The time to display the Home Page is about 5 seconds in my current production
system, and under 3 seconds on my compression test system. Home Page click to
one of our local apps is 7 seconds in current production, 3 seconds in
compressed system, with identical web servers and in the same web browser on
different tabs. The worst case at our site is about a minute from Chicago to
Tel Aviv (via a very weird network path) and after compression it's about 12
seconds. There are similar speed-ups in initial drawing many of the Remedy
screens, not quite as big a difference in navigating between records on a
results list. Of course, any improvement you see will depend on the
configuration of your networks.
Thanks to Norman Dignard for correspondence that helped me to resolve the Unix
gunzip file name issue.
Let me know how it works...
Doug
Doug Blair
Orbitz Worldwide
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+1 312-260-2243 office
+1 224-558-5462 mobile
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