After inspecting HTTP headers I found that much of the static content in the Satellite web UI is not being sent with HTTP Expires headers.  Since the pages can be rather media rich with static content and JavaScript files this drastically increases page load time.

In our Satellite server I have added the following to /etc/httpd/conf.d/zz-spacewalk-www.conf and have been able to drastically reduce page load times and increase responsiveness of our Satellite server.

ExpiresActive On
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|pdf)$">
  ExpiresDefault A86400
  Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

We have been using this for approximately 4-5 weeks and have had no negative consequences.  We have about 625 RHEL 4 and 5 boxes registered to the system which is a VMWare guest with 4vCPUs, 8GB of RAM, embedded database and Raw Mapped SAN LUNs for /rhnsat and /var/satellite.  Between this change and the one suggested in bug 663248 our RHN Satellite server feels like an entirely new system.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=663248

I have taken a relatively conservative stance setting the header one day ahead and only on a few file extensions that are very likely to be static in nature.

Someone with a bit more insight into how Satellite works might be able to make more aggressive changes.

Could the Apache configuration be modified in later releases to set the Expires header on static files in the way I have suggested or similar?

Regards,
-Alan