Comments on: Speed up your Apache/Passenger Rails app in 2min

By: Eliot Sykes

Eliot Sykes — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:50:03 +0000

Using query strings to manage cached assets is unreliable – some caching proxies ignore query strings. Fingerprinted file names is a better solution and recommended by Google. There’s an AssetFingerprint plugin to help with this which I’m shamelessly plugging:

http://blog.eliotsykes.com/2010/05/06/why-rails-asset-caching-is-broken/

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:43:14 +0000

I think you’re right Mike, FilesMatch doesn’t match against the query string.

I’ve been using ERB to render my stylesheets so that they do include time stamps, I wrote about it here: http://deaddeadgood.com/2009/9/28/far-future-expires-headers-for-css-images-in-rails

By: almost effortless » Passenger with nginx on Mac OS X

almost effortless » Passenger with nginx on Mac OS X — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:22:47 +0000

[...] two configuartion tweeks are, I believe, the rough equivalent of the technique previously discussed on this blog for [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:24:07 +0000

Oops, comment editor swallowed my example code–must not like angle brackets. My example just added a backslash before the ‘?’ and ‘d’ in the regexp.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:19:17 +0000

If this was possible, I think the ‘?’ and ‘d’ in that regex would need to be escaped as follows:

I believe, however, that it will not work. I tried this a number of different ways and it appears that the Apache directive ignores the ‘?’ and everything that follows. Otherwise, how could ‘myimage.jpg?1234567890′ possibly match a regexp ending in “$” (which means string ends here)? I did some tests and this is in fact the case–timestamped assets are matched by the original regex and fail to match with any additions after the file extension.

By: Erik

Erik — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:00:20 +0000

After trying a few variations I found I needed to add

ExpiresActive on

to get the Expires headers working. Though I still cannot get the regexp for the timestamps to work. I have tried a few variations that work in Perl/Ruby but I get no results in Apache.

Anyone have a working example that handles timestamps?

Regards

Erik

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:12:53 +0000

Good tip, don’t forget to mention you need to enable mod_deflate also: a2enmod deflate in order for the gzipping to work.

Also, the a2enmod scripts are debian specific i believe? other [lame] distros might need to manually add the module.

And, couldn’t get josh’s code to work, kept saying my css files didn’t have expires headers

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:59:59 +0000

Thanks, Josh! I’ll give that a try. Seems like it would work well to me.

By: Josh N. Abbott

Josh N. Abbott — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:38:25 +0000

This would do the trick wouldn’t it:

# gzip html, css and js
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript

# far future expires headers

ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:10:46 +0000

Yeah, I guess not. Any chance of getting some pointers on how to fix this?

By: Vesa Nieminen

Vesa Nieminen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:57:08 +0000

I doubt you’re using those asset timestamps in your CSS when referencing images used in the interface. File matching regex should probably be changed to only match if asset timestamp is present, just like Ryan Tomayko said.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:40:28 +0000

Hmm… yeah, I hadn’t thought of the impact on chrome and whatnot. I’ll make a note in the post and reconsider the approach. I’m using the Rails-style asset timestamps, though. Wouldn’t that take care of the cache busting?

By: Ryan Tomayko

Ryan Tomayko — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:24:20 +0000

That’ll keep your assets cached forever in browsers and caches. New versions of those files will never be retrieved by clients unless they hard refresh or clear their cache. I’d suggest using Rails-style asset timestamps (“/foo.png?82349824984″) and only set the expires/max-age headers if an asset timestamp is present. Great tip, though. Most sites will see a huge improvement.