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We were recently tasked with a tech update, moving a Java based web application (running in Apache Tomcat) from a Windows 2003 Server to a Windows 2012 server. The IIS8 is passing requests to the Tomcat through Isapi_redirect.dll. The new setup seems to be working, as I can browse to the website successfully.

However, one news page contains a lot of entries. With the old system, the page was displayed immediately and page content was delivered continously (you could see the scroll bar in the browser get shorter). With the new system, the page is only displayed in the browser once it is complete (you enter the url in the browser and hit return, nothing happens for a while and then the page is rendered completely with already the short scrollbar). Calling the same page locally (on the server over port 8080) I see the old behaviour (page displayed immediately and scrollbar gets shorter while page finishes loading).

I searched and found several articles about Response Buffering (which seems to be for ASP pages only), and Output Caching.

Using IIS manager, I navigated to the application pool for the web app, and in the section Output Caching I disabled both feature settings "Enable Cache" and "Enable kernel cache". I also added a cache rule for the extension "*" (which should fit all urls...the web application uses both urls with ".jsp" ending, and servlet names like "/display"), and policy "Prevent all caching" for both kernel mode and user mode.

I then restarted the application pool, did an iisreset, also restarted the Tomcat service. However, there's no change, the behaviour is still the same.

So I just don't know if I did something wrong here, or if I'm just looking at the wrong configuration element. Any help would be welcome.

D.Ogranos
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  • Well, the behaviour you describe looks more like buffering than caching. As a side note, I would suggest not to send back the whole content to the user, but send a limited set of articles on page load, and load the next ones when the user scrolls down the page. This will be better for bandwidth consumption, loading time of the page (= UX), server resources, ... well, it has a lot of advantages. You might only have some concerns about SEO, but that can be handled too. – Laurent S. Nov 25 '13 at 15:45
  • I too thought that this looks like buffering issue. But I cannot seem to find any setting which affects it. I installed the feature "ASP" as described in this article http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/asp/limits, but the setting "Enable Buffering=FALSE" still has no effect. And frankly...it says ASP on the package. I agree that the page should be modified, but this is a legacy app that won't be changed because the customer ain't paying for that. There has to be a way to turn the buffering off! – D.Ogranos Nov 26 '13 at 07:32
  • I finally found this post here on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7178514/php-flush-stopped-flushing-in-iis7-5 (second answer, by Dario). I used the method described there (via Configuration Editor) to find the Element "system.webServer/handlers", then selected the handler in question (ISAPI-dll for me), then set the responseBufferLimit to 0. This seems to have solved the problem for me. – D.Ogranos Nov 27 '13 at 13:42

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