HTTP server optimization

Each HTTP server provides certain features that can be used to optimize request handling and serving content. In this section, we will share some techniques for both Apache and NGINX that can be used to optimize the web server and provide the best performance and scalability. Mostly, when these optimizations are applied, a restart for Apache or NGINX is required.

Caching static files

Mostly, static files, such as images, .css, .js, and fonts don't change frequently. So, it is best practice to cache these static files on the end user machine. For this purpose, the web server adds special headers to the response, which tells the user browser to cache the static content for a certain amount of time. The following is the configuration code for both Apache and NGINX.

Apache

Let's have a look at the Apache configuration to cache the following static content:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|css|js|woff)$">
  Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public
</FileMatch...