How do I remove eTag headers from IIS7?

Question

Per Yahoo's best practices for high performance web sites, I'd like to remove Etags from my headers (I'm manually managing all my caching and have no need for Etags... and when/if I need to scale to a farm, I'd really like them gone). I'm running IIS7 on Windows Server 2008. Anyone know how I can do this?

Answer 1

http://www.jesscoburn.com/archives/2008/10/02/quickly-configure-or-disable-etags-in-iis7-or-iis6/ has a nice pictorial guide.

Essentially, you create a custom response header named ETag and make its value empty.

Answer 2

Under IIS7 the Etag change number (the part of the Etag following : ) is always set to 0.

Hence the Etag from the server no longer varies from server to server for the same file and therefore the Yahoo best practice no longer really applies.

Since you can't actually suppress the ETag header on IIS7 it would probably be best that you don't fiddle with it at all. I've found by far the most useful configuration rule is "If the default doesn't break something, leave it alone".

Answer 3

We had this problem, and even setting a blank custom ETag header in IIS 7 was not working for all files (for example image files). We ended up creating an HttpModule that explicitly removes the ETag header.

Answer 4

In IIS 7 you shouldn't have to worry about etags anymore as the IIS configuration number is always set to 0.

There is still a problem if you have IIS6 & IIS7 webservers in the same farm. In this case you would have to manually set the IIS6 config number to 0 as described in this article.

Etags are actually very useful as you don't need to change the filename like stack overflow does (i.e. default.css?1234). If you change the default.css file it will change the etag and therefore subsequent requests will get the file from the server and not the cache.

Answer 5

You would think doing this in the web.config would work to disable ETags in IIS7. But sniffer trace confirms that ETag is sent down anyway.

<httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
        <remove name="ETag" />
    </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

Using blank doesn't work, either. ETag is sent down anyway.

<httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
        <add name="ETag" value="" />
    </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

Setting the ETag to blank quotes as other sites have suggested doesn't work.

<httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
        <add name="ETag" value="&quot;&quot;" />
    </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

Causes even more ETag to be sent down:

ETag: "8ee1ce1acf18ca1:0",""

In conclusion, nothing I can try or think of works to kill ETag on IIS7, at least without writing custom modules, etc.

Answer 6

I've run into this problem too, but this article seems to solve my ETag issue. Jeff, does this help?

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=922733

Answer 7

If you only serve content from one server, then leave the Etags there, they won't hurt. Instead, configure the YSlow profile to not count for them when assessing the performance. See the Edit button near the Rulesets select element in the YSlow tab. Then uncheck the option regarding ETags from the YSlow(V2) profile.

Answer 8

I know this might cause a bit of monkey work but has .Net's Response.Cache.SetETag(string) method been of use to anyone ?

Answer 9

In IIS 7 you shouldn't have to worry about etags anymore as the IIS configuration number is always set to 0.

NOT TRUE! I'm getting ETags for ALL content on my Server 2008 R2 and they're not 0 (zero) and the MDUTIL mentioned earlier doesn't work either.

Answer 10

Check out this blog post on how to completely remove the Etag http header in iis6,iis7 and iis7.5

http://lightspeednow.com/blog/2010/05/21/iis-tutorial-how-to-completely-remove-etags-entity-tags-from-iis6-iis7-and-iis7-5/