Enabling GZIP compression on Tomcat

Enabling GZIP compression for your web application is a good way to accelerate your web site. This can reduce the size of data being transferred and, consequently, speed your application.

Enabling compression on the web server will make data be transferred in compressed form. The browser will decompress the data on the fly, making the application faster. If your application uses Ajax, what usually increases the volume of data transferred from server to client, compression of data will significantly improve your application performance.

Here is how to enable GZIP compression on Tomcat: edit file /conf/server.xml and add to the HTTP Connector configuration something like this:

compression="on"
compressionMinSize="2048"
noCompressionUserAgents="gozilla, traviata"
compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml"

An example of a HTTP Connector configuration with compression enabled could be:

Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
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"

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