<p>What is the best way to reduce the size of the viewstate hidden field in JSF?
I have noticed that my view state is approximately 40k this goes down to the client and back to the server on every request and response espically coming to the server this is a significant slowdown for the user.  </p>

<p>My Environment JSF 1.2, MyFaces, Tomcat, Tomahawk, RichFaces</p>

If you are using MyFaces you can try this setting to compress the viewstate before sending to the client.
```
```
<context-param>
    <param-name>org.apache.myfaces.COMPRESS_STATE_IN_CLIENT</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param> `
```
```