Hi.
I have to apologise.
I misunderstood your first post, and I wanted to verify on the Tomcat list, so I quoted
the following passage of your first post in my message there :
"Sadly, the tomcat dev's forgot to set any caching headers in the HTTP response (either
Expires, Last-Modified or Cache-control) so the sites are largely uncacheable by browsers
and the various tomcats are becoming overloaded."
Unfortunately, the Tomcat Dev's there took it rather seriously, and as a consequence now
you name is shit on the Tomcat list.
.. just kidding, I did not quote your name.
Anyway, apart from a few huffed responses to my misquote (since then rectified), someone
provided a suggestion that may not be the simplest, but might be helpful anyway in some
cases :
Have a look at : http://www.tuckey.org/urlrewrite/
This is a "Java Servlet Filter", which can be added transparently "around" any Tomcat web
application (by adding the required section in the web.xml config file of that web
application).
Java Servlet Filters are such that the Tomcat web application is not even aware that it is
there, and continues to work as before. Much like Apache input and output filters in
fact, except that a Java Servlet Filter is both at the same time (it "wraps" the webapp on
both sides).
Anyway, this filter can do such things as conditionally or not adding response headers to
anything the webapp produces. And it can do much more, as with time it has evolved into
some kind of mish-mash of mod_rewrite, mod_headers and mod_proxy.
It is more one-by-one work than doing something at the Apache front-end level or via a
proxy, but it also provides better fine-tuning possibilities.
So, if you can for instance easily identify the worst offenders, it might be an
option.
And it is certainly a good tool to have in one's toolcase.
