All About AEM Dispatcher: From Basics to Advanced Setup

Why Do We Need Dispatcher in AEM?

• When a website receives millions of requests, if every request directly hits AEM, it would become slow and overloaded. AEM is powerful for creating, managing, and publishing content, but handling things like caching, redirects, load balancing, and security is not its main job.
• That’s why we never expose AEM publish servers directly to end users. Instead, we place a web server in between. But a normal web server alone doesn’t know how to work with AEM.
• To solve this, Adobe provides the Dispatcher – a module that works with the web server.

👉 Dispatcher helps with:

• ⚡ Caching → Serves pages instantly without hitting AEM every time

• 📊 Load Balancing → Distributes traffic across multiple AEM instances

• 🔒 Security → Blocks unwanted requests and protects AEM servers

• 🎯 Request Handling → Manages redirects and access control

✅ Note:

Dispatcher is the bridge between AEM and the web server, ensuring your website is fast, scalable, and secure.

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What is Dispatcher?

👉 Dispatcher in AEM is a caching and load balancing tool that sits in front of the publish instance. It improves performance by serving cached content, ensures scalability by distributing requests, and adds security by filtering access to AEM.

🚀 How to Set Up AEM Dispatcher

🔹 Step 1: Understand the Architecture

👉 User request → Web Server + Dispatcher → AEM Publish Instance

Here, Dispatcher is not a standalone server – it’s a module installed on a web server like Apache HTTP Server or Microsoft IIS.

🔹 Step 2: Install a Web Server

1. Choose your web server (commonly Apache HTTPD).