Website optimization and WAF

[Thomas Holzner 2]

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding NetScaler and WAF optimization, and I’m hoping someone here might have some insights.

We’ve received a request from a client about optimizing their web presence in conjunction with a WAF:

The goal is to support Etags on our website to speed up the loading of static content and improve the performance of both the website and the Passngr app. However, this seems to conflict with how the WAF operates. The WAF currently prevents any form of caching by stripping out relevant headers, including the If-None-Match header in our case (refer to the following links for more details on the headers being removed and other header modifications).

Could you investigate how best to approach this? Also, is there a Citrix-recommended way to meet this kind of requirement?

The client’s main concern is saving bandwidth on the client side by avoiding repeated requests for static content.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this, or guidance on best practices from Citrix would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Nicola Campaci]

Hi

The optimizations you want to implement are server-side using ETag. You have a Netscaler that can do even better. If you want to speed up the loading of static resources on your sites, you can use the Netscaler's Integrated Caching (https://docs.netscaler.com/en-us/citrix-adc/current-release/faqs/faq-integrated-caching.html) and have the Netscaler cache manage all static content, without the need to use ETag on the application side, offloading the backend servers from this task."
https://docs.netscaler.com/en-us/citrix-adc/current-release/optimization/integrated-caching.html

Regards