Comments on: Speed Tips: Turn Off ETags

By: AskApache

AskApache — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:01:00 +0000

Depends on the kind of load balancer.. Usually you can just change the FileETag to generate the ETags based on something the various nodes in the load-balancer will have that matches up...

So using:

FileETag Size

Would avoid different ETags being sent by different nodes.

By: AskApache

AskApache — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:01:00 +0000

Depends on the kind of load balancer.. Usually you can just change the FileETag to generate the ETags based on something the various nodes in the load-balancer will have that matches up...

So using:

FileETag Size

Would avoid different ETags being sent by different nodes.

By: James

James — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:42:00 +0000

How do you properly configure ETags on servers across a load balancer?

By: James

James — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:42:00 +0000

How do you properly configure ETags on servers across a load balancer?

By: Tim Boudreau

Tim Boudreau — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:02:50 +0000

I fear people are going to read this and take this as good advice; it is terrible advice *unless* you are using a web server that implements generating ETag headers in a sloppy way. If you are using a web application or a web server that implements the ETag as a hash of the bytes that would be sent, then it is a very effective way for a web server to describe how a resource should be cached in a way that is not date-dependent.

The lesson here is *not* that eliminating ETag headers is a magic recipe that will make your website faster - in most cases it will do the exact opposite. The lesson is, don't use a webserver that implements ETag headers in a naive and fragile way.

By: mark Bateman

mark Bateman — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:16:06 +0000

hi folks,

I have a client with an apache server that is not returning last-modified but we a re not finding any setting's that unset that header in either the config files or .htaccess files (we have none of those in fact) where else could this be being overridden or is it missing because they are returning a mime type of text/hmtl..

thanks..

By: Stephan

Stephan — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:43:55 +0000

find it bad for performance... jumped from 5 to 7-10 sec

By: My name is what?

My name is what? — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:29:50 +0000

Great! But just only one thing... The result will be dramatic under Internet Explorer.
IE 7 seems to handle in diffrent way images and html documents (mime types in short)
It seems to need ETAG in order to cache images..
Please, forget about this article and leave your ETAG switched on,
or finally you will end with overloaded and transfer-exhausted Web Server.

Take care!

By: Kent Richards

Kent Richards — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 05:11:33 +0000

I tried many combinations from the various articles on askapache and on Google's help pages, but the browser wasn't caching. Finally, I removed FileETag None, and it cached as expected. If you're having problems and have the distributed content concern mentioned in this article, try FileETag Size, or FileETag MTime with attention to preserving modification times on files when mirroring. Docs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#fileetag

By: Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:28:31 +0000

Including the inode in a load-balanced group of webservers will likely guarantee too much uniqueness in generated ETags, but how about just filesize and timestamp?

FileETag MTime Size

should do the trick I'd think? Or possibly leave off the Size attribute?

Too bad ETag isn't a proper hash value on the file contents (at least as an option)..