Home / server / Questions / 385716
Accepted
Yeti
Asked: 2012-05-04 07:08:00 +0800 CST

Why are changes in a file so slow? (Apache Tomcat)

  • 772

I got an Apache Tomcat 7 server. If I change a file on the server (for example stylesheet, javascript file or any plain/text file), for example using vim. Then if I go to the file in an internet browser, and press F5 a few times till I see the actual change, I have to wait (while pressing F5 every 500 ms) a few seconds (~3 seconds) before I see what I just changed.

Thus in short: if a file is changed on the server, I see it ~3 seconds later client side. So somewhere there has to be a cache, probably server side since I use F5 which should discard client side cache. So how can I setup a directory on my Apache Tomcat server so that it will not cache files?

I want to do this because I created a simple Ajax/Servlet based website to chat. But after typing a message, it will appear ~3 secs later. I know this can be way faster, because I have done it before on a PHP free webhost server.

tomcat

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Tomcat caches static content with a TTL of 5 secs by default. If you want to change that see http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html#Attributes. Specifically you want cacheTTL, cachingAllowed and maybe cacheMaxSize and cacheObjectMaxSize.

    • 3

  2. Not sure how Tomcat adds the no cache to everything. The easy way to control the headers yourself is to write and configure a generic header filter in web.xml as follows:

    === web.xml ===

    NoCache x.y.z.filters.ResponseHeaderFilter

    Cache-Control no-cache, must-revalidate

    CacheForWeek uk.co.slc.crm.common.filters.ResponseHeaderFilter

    Cache-Control max-age=604800, public

    NoCache /*.do

    CacheForWeek /images/*

    CacheForWeek /*.js

    CacheForWeek /*.css

    === web.xml ===

    • 0