gzip compression in web server or app server ?

Question

I'm using Weblogic application server and Apache web server in my J2EE environment and planning to implement gzip compression of response.

Not sure, whether to implement compression on the Apache server or on the weblogic.

Answer 1

Depends whether you want the headers to be handled by apache or by the app server. You need to set the encoding type and content length headers to use gzip compression for http. Apache may be more potentially optimised for it.

Answer 2

Unless you have a very good reason to not do so, you want to put the load of compression on the web servers since the app servers are already busy at doing other things. To use mod_weblogic together with mod_deflate, have a look at this post.