CHANGELOG: Puakma Web Booster (PT0023)
webWise Network Consultants

The following items denote all changes made to this product. Latest changes appear at the top of the list. Some old versions of software may be downloaded by clicking on the availability column, however it is recommended that customers always use the latest software.

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VersionAvailabilityChange TypeDetails
3.0.0EnhancementAdd trust store functionality to allow TLS certificate based authentication over SSL.
3.0.0EnhancementWhen BOOSTERUseRealHostName=1 now also updates the Referer: header with the target system's host name
2.105.0BugTweaked logic for calculating expires: header for cache items.
2.105.0EnhancementBooster now sends Connection: keep-alive when replying with a cache hit (if the client supports it). This should result in a small performance improvement when serving pages with lots of images/css/js etc.
2.105.0OtherChanged the default BOOSTERMaxURI to 2048 (from 512). Most customers appear to hit the max limit easily.
2.105.0New FeatureBOOSTERStickySessions=1 This new setting ensures that a client will always be directed to the same server in the cluster. This is useful for portal server where jsessionid is server specific. If the client's server becomes unavailable, they will receive an "unavailable" message and not be directed to another server in the cluster.
2.105.0Bug"tell booster cache status" would show no console output if caching is disabled. Updated to now show "-> Caching is OFF"
2.105.0BugChanged the way the cache behaves to now include a "keep in cache" until value as well as an "expires" values for the web resource. Previously expires and keep in cache were wrongly used interchangeably.
2.105.0BugIf a server set a far (eg 5 days) future expiry date that exceeded the maximum cache time, the "Expires:" http header would not honour the original expiry date set by the http server.
2.105.0New FeatureAdd new puakma.config variable "BOOSTERMaxUploadBytes" to control how big the largest post to the server may be. eg: BOOSTERMaxUploadBytes=157286400 will allow up to 150MB to be uploaded (entire http payload)
2.105.0BugFixed an issue when serving cached content. If the backend server responds with a "Server: " as a http header, Booster would erroneously send a "" in the http headers, prematurely ending the http package (due to extra \r\n\r\n).
2.97 ClickEnhancementUpdated Booster to work better with IIS 6.0. IIS 6 replies to POSTs with a 100 Continue and a 200 OK.
2.97 ClickEnhancementChanged the functionality of BOOSTERUnavailableFile= in puakma.config. When this setting is missing or does not refer to a valid file, the connection will be dropped immediately. This allows smart switches to sit in front of Booster and allows them to detect when there are no available hosts in the cluster.
2.97 ClickNew FeatureIn booster.config FORCECLIENTSSL~*=1 This new setting will force the browser connection to use SSL for the named cluster. Default setting is 0, or does not force SSL.
2.97 ClickBugPreviously when HTTPHeaderProcessors replied to the client with no http payload (such as in the case of a 401 response), Booster would add a payload of "Response has no content". Booster now supports a content-length: of zero
2.97 ClickBugIt was possible for data to be served from the Booster cache even after a HTTPHeaderProcessor had replied to the client
2.93BugAltered the way the content length was being set in the http headers to use the more robust puakma.util.Util.replaceHeaderValue(). Previously if there was no content length value (as is the case for chunked) a content-length would not be set.
2.93New FeatureWeb Booster will now retrieve the correct session object for use with HTTPHeaderProcessors. This allows header processors to store objects on a booster session.
2.93New FeatureAdd new method to HTTPHeaderProcessor to allow the retrieval of posted HTTP data. This is useful for programmers who want to process their own login forms HTMLDocument doc = HTTPHeaderProcessor.getDocument(sCharSet);
2.93BugFixed an issue where head requests sent through booster would cause a socket timeout.
2.93EnhancementChange logic so unless http server specifically says 'Connection: keep-alive', assume the connection will be closed. This stops the browser waiting for a socket timeout when the header is omitted (as it is in WebSphere)
2.93BugFixed bug where booster tried to compress chunked content which caused a socket timeout
2.93New FeatureImplementation of backup clusters. When the primary cluster is unavailable its backup will be used.
2.93EnhancementNew console command "tell booster poll" to force booster to poll the backend servers.
2.70OtherNow shipping jcifs jar file for use with NTLM authentication
2.70EnhancementAllow serving of files from off the filesystem. New config parameter BOOSTERPublicDir=../html_public
2.70New FeatureNew puakma.config setting BOOSTERNoCompressURI= to stop Booster compressing certain files on the host web server. Accepts * at the beginning, end or both, eg BOOSTERNoCompressURI=*/lib*,/vault/*
2.691BugAdded an explicit flush() and finish() to gzip outputstream.
2.691EnhancementIncreased the output stream from 512 to 2KB to improve network I/O. Also increased the default gzip outputstream buffer to 2048 bytes.
2.691New FeatureImplemented license files *.lic copied to the /config directory
2.691BugSockets were not being closed correctly on disobedient client connections. Added new parameter BOOSTERPortTimeout= to control how long a socket will remain open with no data being transferred. Default is 30 seconds.
2.691BugLarge items were using an unneccessary amount of memory when being transferred due to the possibility of the item being cached. The item is now checked for size and if too large is not buffered in memory at all.
2.691BugWhen a client POSTed data to the server, in some circumstances it was possible for the reply to be served from the cache. Logic added to not cache replies to POSTs.
2.691EnhancementAdded new parameters to better control cache behaviour and force caching for webservers that would otherwise have uncacheable content. BOOSTERMinCacheSeconds=20 BOOSTERRemoveCacheInfo=1 BOOSTERAlwaysCacheURI=/ BOOSTERCacheContentTypes=* BOOSTERNoCacheContentTypes=text/html,text/xml BOOSTERRemoveCacheInfo=1 BOOSTERFixContentTypes=1
2.691BugChanged the behaviour of the cache and shared cache so that virtual servers are cached correctly. eg multiple domain names residing on the same machine.
2.63New FeatureCaching of web content is now supported. New puakma.config parameters: BOOSTERServerCacheMB=20 BOOSTERUseSharedCache=0 BOOSTERMaxCacheableObjectKB=512 BOOSTERMaxCacheMinutes=1440
2.63EnhancementAbility to control the maximum size of web objects that may be gzipped. Previously there was a hard limit of 512KB to avoid running out of memory. BOOSTERMaxgzipKB=512
2.63EnhancementUpdated pdf configuration document
2.63Enhancement'tell booster status' and 'tell booster cache status' have been added/updated to display Booster state.
2.54OtherUpdated documentation for SSO
2.54New FeatureLogging of compression statistics to logfile in /logs/. This enables users to determine how much Booster is compressing data
2.54New FeatureAdd web logging capability to Booster to allow HTTP hit statistics to be run against Booster. This also releives the logging burden from the backend HTTP server.
2.54New FeatureAdded ability to Boost http 1.0 servers and compress chunked content.
2.54OtherFirst public release