Caching JS and CSS files using RoR Passenger on Apache

Question

I have just put into production one of my Ruby On Rails Application and noticed it was really slow in its loading time.

My Application runs on railsplayground.net using passenger on an apache server.

I took a look at a couple of sites including: pingdom , webpagetest and the major downfall I had noticed in my application is that the caching isn't working on my javascript and css files as can be seen here: enter image description here

I have tried reading all sorts of guides on how to cache, but all of my efforts turned up with no results.

I put this in my header file:

  <meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="public" />
  <meta http-equiv="last-modified" content="Sun, 23 Sep 2012 08:00:00 GMT" />

and this is turned on in my production.rb:

config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

Frederick Cheung · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-23 15:10:18Z

4

What these items are complaining about is that the when you are serving static assets (images, css, javascript) the webserver isn't telling the browser that they are cacheable so they will be refetched more often than necessary.

When using the asset pipeline (as you seem to be) the asset filename includes an md5 checksum of its content so you can set very long expiry times: if you change the file then the checksum will change to and so the file browsers requests will have a different name.

You usually do this in apache's configuration, by sticking something like this in the block for the virtual host

<Location /assets>
      ExpiresActive on
      ExpiresDefault "access plus 1000 days"
</Location>

It's also worth turning on gzipping of javascript & css files which can save a lot of time. You'd do this by adding something like this to the virtual host:

<Location />
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/css  application/javascript application/json text/javascript
</Location>

Older browsers may not support this, but this is so widely supported that I turn this on systematically (to give you an idea, even IE 4 and Netscape Navigator 4 support this)

answered Sep 23, 2012 at 15:10

Frederick Cheung

84.3k9 gold badges157 silver badges175 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Dias Over a year ago

Hi Frederick Cheung <Location /assets> ExpiresActive on ExpiresDefault "access plus 1000 days" </Location> seems to cache the files in public/assets folder of rails app Could you explain how we can cache something outside of assets folder eg : public/system In my app images are uploaded to public/system folder

Frederick Cheung Over a year ago

It really depends how those files are being served - probably deserves a question of its own (assuming there's not already some questions around this)

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Caching JS and CSS files using RoR Passenger on Apache

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related