Tomcat gzip compression

This page describes how to activate gzip compression for a Bonita Platform with Tomcat.

Gzip compression can improve performance by reducing network load.

Tomcat configuration

To activate gzip compression for http requests, you need to modify the server.xml configuration.

Open server.xml and find the Connector configuration corresponding to HTTP. Edit the section to add following parameters:

compression="on"
compressionMinSize="X"
noCompressionUserAgents="Y"
compressableMimeType="Z"
Property Description Example

compression

Activates or deactivates gzip compression.

on

compressionMinSize

The minimum size of resources to be compressed. It is not useful to compress resources that are already small.

2048 (default value)

noCompressionUserAgents

The User Agents for which compressions is not to be used. Some older browseers do not support compression.

gozilla, traviata

compressableMimeType

The MIME types of the resources to be compressed. We recommend that all text files be compressed.

text/html,text/xml

If you use the Tomcat bundle, the file to edit is BUNDLE_HOME/server/conf/server.xml. If you use a different package, use the corresponding path; for example on Ubuntu the file is located in /etc/tomcat8/server.xml.

Connector configuration:

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
           connectionTimeout="20000"
           maxThreads="100"
           redirectPort="8443"
           maxPostSize="-1"
           URIEncoding="UTF-8"
           compression="on"
           noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata" />

Official Tomcat documentation for HTTP Configuration.

Check changes

After you modify the file, restart your application server and test with the following curl command: curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' http://ip_address:port/bonita/login.jsp

Check that the header returned contains the line Content-Encoding: gzip. The output should be similar to this:

HTTP/1.1 200
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Cache-Control: max-age=36000
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=031D2F9C4DBFAD48A19670AEF83A57E6; Path=/; HttpOnly
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Encoding: gzip